Posted by
VBushmills on Saturday, August 22, 2009 9:25:38 AM
All solutions to a problem begin with a unified theory as to its cause.
- G House, M.D.
The title is dedicated to Rush Limbaugh, who once asked his listeners to come up with a source of "liberalism".
We will do much better in dealing with"liberalism" if we first understand that underneath the political ideas of the Left we are fighting a deeply psychological one...and a very ancient one indeed...which seems to have overtaken a large segment of the American psyche.
For some time now we here have been trying to isolate and define the "elitist" or "class" gene and have found that it is very nearly identical to the "liberal" gene Rush Limbaugh is looking for.
For the American Left politics is not so much an end, as the means to a class-oriented vindication, the fulfillment of a birthright. This applies to the rank-and-file of modern liberalism, whose genuine Leftism is about as deep as a five-iron's divot, but also to the leadership, who is at least practiced in the ideas of Marx to one extent or another. In my view there are few if any dyed-in-the-wool "true believing" Marxists in America, in the sense that uniting the workers of the world, and protecting them by creating a selfless national state, managed by altruistic zealots, and stuff like that, is their compelling driving force...versus feeding some greater personal, inner need. Most who study Marx today only want to know how to litter the air with propaganda leaflets before laying IED's under our Freedom Train. Why this is so is because those unmet "secret supplications of the heart" go back to Marx himself, and well beyond him.
While not genuinely philosophical, there is a genuinely psychological chain that personally links Karl Marx to modern Leftism which, in 150 years, is as unbroken as the nearly 2000 years of celebrating the Eucharist at Sunday mass. Only that psychology actually runs further back, preceding Christianity. Karl Marx had a personal ax to grind, which, as we describe it here, you will quickly recognize as possessing at least two generations of Americans; in academe, Hollywood, the public square, but most of all, the state sector and political arena. What Marx did no other could was find the right words (not the cause) that would excite and animate generations of young men and women, who would follow suite, carrying that same ax handle. It was all just a matter of timing and location, location, location.
What we are seeing carried out today in America is simply a continuation of a class theme that began in Greece, dressed then in the airy raiment of speculative philosophy, re-emerging in France around 800 in the royal dress of nobility, then rope-a-doping through Germany and Europe in the 19th Century dressed in the rags of anti-establishment ideology, and finally across the pond, where it found a home in the tie dye and denim hip pockets of the largest assemblage of bratty self-illuminated sonnenkinder the world has seen. That beat goes on.
And it is mostly about one person.
What We're Fighting For, What They're Fighting Against
I was going over some of Moses Sands old notes, about his only hero as a kid, a kid named Jim, who was the captain of the football team. Moses revealed Jim also to be the leader of a group of "protectors" in their school. It seems Jim and a couple of others kept the bullying of the Fatty's, Gimp's, Four-Eye's, and Egg-Head's in their school to the barest minimum, and, according to Moses, simply by the strength of their character and their presence. They didn't even charge for the service. And Jim wasn't even a Boy Scout. It was just what footfall heroes did then.
And it was a practice that continued well after Moses graduated, for Moses was also a "protector", proving the best solutions to social problems in school are always free.
As Moses described him, Jim was a gangly 165 pounds, yet commanded space more often given today to a fellow with three guys standing behind him holding tire irons. He was only kind of handsome, a little shy, but had girl friends, only not the Homecoming Queen. He didn't wear the finest of clothes, didn't have a car (few did in those days) and came from a home nearer the tracks than High Street. His dad was an electrician and Moses said he'd never seen his mother. Maybe she stayed indoors.
But there was just something about Jim. He wasn't the best player, but was elected captain. He made everything else work. But there clearly were lines people couldn't cross with him, even his friends. He seemed to have an innate sense of fairness that extended outwards rather then inwards, unlike modern indignation. He stayed out of everyone's business, and they his, but he sure got testy when he saw the helpless being pushed around.
"Oh, and Jim was a C-student,", Moses went on to say. "Never went to college...not because of the war, mind you. Just never had the inclination. He was a sergeant, not an officer, when he was leading his men into battle." Jim died in Italy in 1944 at the ripe old age of 22.
Jim was Moses Sands' personification of the C-student, and in his mind, the object of the deepest purpose of the Constitution.
People my age can also remember people like Jim. So I know them when I see them today, for the Yellow Pages are filled with Jim's...not a few in the professional listings, but mostly guys who built small businesses without college degrees, just a sense of time, place and purpose, common sense and local knowledge. These Jim's weren't necessarily anti-authoritarian or rowdies as kids, and certainly not "slow" as the Ritalin dispensers want to allege, but more of the "I'd rather build it myself" mode. I recall talking with a South Carolina builder who was a late bloomer. At 38 he was a construction foreman, at 50, a millionaire. He had an incredible knack of looking at an acre of land and working up in his mind just how many yards of concrete he'd need. A high school grad, with years of apprenticeship before going off on his own, I asked him once if he'd ever regretted not becoming an engineer or getting an MBA, or law degree...and he smiled, and said, "Well, I'd always sort of hoped someday I could have those guys on my payroll."
And he does.
Jim's are just like everyone else in that they go where circumstances take them...but unlike most of the others, they also have an eye out as to where opportunity can take them...if not today, maybe tomorrow or whenever it knocks. The Jim's of America have often paid a hefty price for wanting to live in a
world in which they were their own boss, even when they weren't. No one's ever isolated that gene, if there is such a thing, but we all know some men and women who are just "turned" that way. They sometimes come off as loners or contrary, and independent all the time. Like so many attributes of success, it is not one that is apt to show up on an IQ test, or in a GPA. In a variety of costumes and circumstances, America was built this way, and that's what makes us unique.
But you won't always see Jim's running their own business. You may also find them out on the back forty pulling tree stumps or on the factory floor. And they won't necessarily be foremen or supervisors. Jim's pick their own territory, and the workplace may not be the place they want to shine. You may have to join the rod and gun club, or go to a car show, or a fiddlin' contest, to see where some Jim's show off their stuff.
Still, in the non-union, no, even union shops, you'll find Jim to be the first person the men turn to when an "issue" arises. Not the boss, not the steward. Jim. He'll give his opinion, then everyone will go off and do whatever needs to be done based on "how Jim sees it". Every successful shop floor has a Jim...somewhere.
In the end, often all Jim does is settle other men's minds. He's the stability in a job most of them really don't like all that much. They like having him there, and they like being on his side of an issue. They care what he thinks, although he rarely offers it unsolicited. If there's a fire, they look to see which exit Jim heads for.
There is a word for what these Jim's do, whether on the football field, the factory floor, in an office, or on the battlefield. They "lead"... and they usually lead by acclamation, not by the powers vested in the Secretary of the Army, Congress, or some university Board of Governors. Every good baseball team has such a leader. And he isn't necessarily the
best hitter. Johnny Unitas and Bart Starr were both Jim's; one put up
the numbers,
the other, the championships. But both led. Just ask. According to Moses, people who knew
him said that JFK exuded that sort of leadership as well. As soon as he opened his mouth,
you wanted to follow him...even knowing his dark side. On television, people, especially the young, could see it in his bearing, which, Moses told me more than
once, was not because of his good looks or Harvard. "That's what Kerry
never could understand. JFK didn't have to fake it." I knew a general
like that, a four-star named Stilwell. (The other Stilwell.) Ten
minutes with him and all you could say is "Where do I sign up."
How prevalent are these Jim's these days? They are still among the first hundred names in any telephone directory in America.
(Oh, and because of the Constitution of the United States, they can do all this without having to kiss anyone's arse for the privilege.)
This is why we fight.
The Hole in the Soul Gang
To understand the source of "modern liberalism" we have to first understand the unique nature of America's Jim's and the things they can do ...well. You might wonder why anyone would not admire the Jim I just described. Locally, in a small town, that was once so, and on a small enough stage, probably so even today. But Sara Palin of Wasilla, Sara Palin of Juneau, and Sara Palin, national political figure, even though all the same person, are seen in an entirely different way at each level. A part of American society has been re-conditioned to look upon these Jim's and Jane's, er, Sara's with a mixed bag of emotions, from fear and disdain, to jealousy and hatred. Only it's not the Jim's who have changed the last two hundred years, no more than Sara had changed all that much from Wasilla to Juneau to the Republican Convention.
So, we need to consider here the primal nature of Jim's (and Jane's) kind of talent, intelligence and leadership, for these are just some of several ingredients whose definitions have been co-opted, then co-mingled with a bunch of other now-nebulous terms, creating false correlations with which modern liberals have used to define themselves and the place they think they (should) rank in the modern world...vis a vis Jim. Always vis a vis a Jim.
For you see, every time a Jim succeeds, they feel cheated. Jim is the principal bogeyman of the Left's common culture. The ability of America's Jim's to build, to create (especially wealth), to excel, lead and especially govern, without following the protocols prescribed by the newly defined intellectual classes, without being one of them, without displaying success in their prescribed manner, is at the root of modern liberalism in America. This is why certain types of people in America hate our Jim's and Jane's, and always have...even before they knew them by name.
Modern "liberalism" and much of the psychology of the American Left is based on this deep resentment for our Jim's...just as the world's anger is directed against America, for allowing Jim's to exist at all. After all, Europe keeps her Jacque's, Sebastion's and Jakob's pretty much corralled, and always had. Why can't we?
This resentment is the Left's defining characteristic, their wellspring of identity, and is based largely on contrived estimations of themselves. This is the change in American perspectives I just spoke of, only it is more a cancerous growth rather than change. From our earliest times we have always had our pampered and spoiled children, usually from very affluent homes. But as affluence spread into the 21st Century, it was only natural that the psychology would grow as well...built on a sense of entitlement completely de-linked from any sense of achievement other than having been born.
Exit "cause-and-effect", stage left.
Since the 1960s the Left has defined themselves almost entirely by what they hate, and it is demonstrably cultural and class-based. The philosophy (Marx, environmentalism, etc) came later, as a mask, and the politics just naturally attaches itself to them, like a hot-pink Post It note. Politics is merely the sharp fingernails they use to get even for what they see as a fundamentally unfair world. Lenin could not have created a more perfect useful idiot class if he'd had Sauron in the lab.
This resentment begins early and is reinforced every day. In public schools today Jim's are steered toward a herd-like conformity, which causes their natural resistance to being bureaucratically man-handled, even in the third grade, to seem anti-social and threatening. So Fatty, Four-Eyes, Egg-Head and Gimpy are all conditioned to see every Jim as a threat rather than a rescue, thus increasing, not decreasing their risk of being victimized. But seriously, how can any Jim face down a real bully today when the only ammunition allowed him is a big, tough "I'll report you to Teacher."? As George C Patton said, "Where's the honor in that?
Despite their arguable Alpha-minds, our little alienists-in-making's noses are rubbed in their own Delta-thru-Omega character traits (courage, fortitude, loyalty, gratitude, etc), for every day they see people they consider beneath them intellectually (there are other defining criteria) getting better marks for achievement; more attention, awards, and popularity. College turns out to be no better and certainly, always, forever and a day, on into professional life, there is that kid who dropped out in 11th grade to go to work for his uncle, and now owns the company, and just bought that "little place" on Sanibel from Brett Favre, while you're still sitting around in your law firm knocking down a measly buck twenty five a year. (I'm not making this stuff up.) Between lawyers and journalists, lawyers by far have the sharper fingernails.
You will find this same resentment in Karl Marx, by the way (I don't want to get ahead of myself) although I think even Marx was never quite this petty, and to the extent most professing American "progressives" actually know very little of Marxism, I could never quite blame ol' Karl for teaching this brood how to hate. True, he was the first to give respectability to intellectual resentment, but never did he believe, I think, that it could ever descend to the levels of abject teatty-babyism it has.
The Tiger Woods Effect
There is a mechanics to understanding this deep resentment. The first step is what I call the Tiger Woods Effect.
The Tiger Woods Effect is simple: it defines what happens inside a person when he sees someone who is better at a thing than he is, something he'd like to be good at, and recognized for it. (If you're a NASCAR fan you can simply replace Tiger with Richard
Petty, same result; Music? Mozart, same, or Lennon/McCartney, same. Genius? DaVinci, same). It defines how a person handles that fact that he is never going to be a "that guy", Tiger Woods. It's what happens when you realize some things come to others more easily than you, from talent, good looks, to brains.
The first thing to understand, we all confront this almost daily, and most of us walk away unchanged in any significant way. We adapt almost instantaneously with the realization that we've just seen someone with a better swing, a cuter behind, knew the Treaty of Ghent just half a step quicker than you did, or could work Pythagorean's Theorem a full minute quicker. In Tiger Wood's stratosphere we learn that being No 2, or even number 20, can still be very profitable. And every once in awhile we may even beat him. In more ordinary pursuits we learn to take satisfaction in the job well done, and place our sense of competitiveness in a different context.
But when you thought you were the best, or could be the best, or was told you could be...by Mom and Dad, the teacher...you know, and then went onto college to find a thousand more straight-A students, especially those from Catholic schools, or of late, home-schooled by a troglodye mother, and you learned being Number One back in Pleasantville High was easy, but State U hard, things changed. Again, most of us accepted the B's with the equanimity expected of any horny drunk college freshman on his first extended stay away from home. I was magnanimous as hell, in fact.
But for some, a growing minority in America, one can be quite traumatized by this realization. For no particular reason, he or she can even learn to hate Tiger, that sunavabitch to whom Rodrigo's "Concerto de Aranjuez" came so effortlessly, or the football hero.
It's beyond my skill to individually pscho-analyze this individual, but there are so many of them now, some stereotypical comments can be made.
Whether conditioned at home or in certain types of school situations, or by criteria that are purely personal, this child (it does develop early) is made to believe that he is very good or very smart, and usually in a general sort of way. I say "general way" because prodigies are discovered by the their talent, not developed by pushy parents. No matter how much Mom tells Li'l Fauntelroy he's a flash in math, the truth will out very early on. Better to say that he reads well above his age level, or somesuch. The criterion from Mom and Dad may be as thin as skim milk, but early on a kid has a very high opinion of him/herself with really very little to show for it.
Just combine that with all sorts of externals, such as over-protective parent(s), an absence of free play with other kids, especially rough play, with scrapes and bruises, and games with rules, all of which expose children to various skill and talent levels. Then substitute many of these social activities simply by shoving a book or computer game under the kid's nose, and it's easy to see that a fairly developed sense of self, developed in a vacuum, exists before the kid hits first grade.
Now, once upon a time, this was common among the children of the wealthy, who all through their youth led sheltered, protected and planned lives, often, as we saw with the young radicals of the 60's, with a disastrous revolt later on in life. They dealt with these "Tiger Woods confrontations" in small doses, usually culminating in their lesser placing in the Foreign Service after leaving Princeton, or, if British, selling national secrets to the Soviets...all these petty jealousies played very much out of public sight.
But as affluence spread, so did this sort of upbringing, even into the lower classes (if an only child...who probably become serial killers), without a strong family structure. I've seen mothers still hand-walk their 9 or 10 year old sons across a parking lot at the YMCA. The fear of child-snatching in public places, bullying in school, and pop-up thunderstorms on Thursday after school, have pretty much corralled these children in ways that no child psychologist can say is healthy. I'm just saying.
In social situations they find themselves outsiders, spectators, not participants, and generally find it disagreeable that the things that matter to them don't seem to matter as much to the group. I remember my own disappointment on a cross country trip with buddies to run *hores in Mexico, when I popped in a cassette of flute music from the Andes, that everyone immediately yecched and took it out, replacing it with another hour of the Rolling Stones...only I just popped another Coors and sang along. Some people can't adjust that well.
I chose Tiger Woods as my example because he participates in a sport that is based on individual skill and achievement, where, on any given day, all things are as close to equal as you can get for all the contestants. I've found the hole-in-the-soul gang don't really like this aspect of egalitarianism, although they say they are 10-4 for it. But since this is a cultural/political piece, and sport so easily dismissed as an irrelevancy to Leftists, I could just as easily replace Tiger with say, the ranking A-scientist in a research institute. The "Tiger Effect" in the institute can work two ways, as 1) when a young, bright new PhD joins a team and quickly learns that all the team members to be genuinely superior to him in intellect (see Tom Weiskoff, Phil Mickelson), or, 2) when that newbie scientist just knocks their socks off with his own brilliance (see Mozart and Salieri).
In either case, everyone is changed, and sometimes in a major way, as is team chemistry. In the first instance, this is true crucible for the young scientist, a crossroads, and it can be a career-ender even before his career has really begun. In the second instance, he may get a real dose of what we call "office politics", back-biting, that sort of thing, or, being true professionals the team may actually grow even better. This depends on whether Antonio Salieri is on staff, or whether the team administrator can manage the new dynamic, or even wants to (bureuacracy) or worse, whether there is also a staff lawyer.
These are real life examples and happen almost every day. Even into the simpler part of our lives, from early on, we are constantly seeing things that alter our vision of ourselves just a little. But we move on.
But as I said, with some this is a serious trauma, and a trauma some will refuse to acknowledge even exists, for there is a kind of self-delusion, a separation from reality that occurs when a person has to confront his own ordinariness in the mirror.
They can go through several processes of either denigrating that other person, or his class, or his ability. Sports is easy, so easy it has become a cultural prop these days. It's easy today to simply demote the A-physical speciman (athlete) to a class beneath that of the A-mental speciman, and in the process, completely disregard things such as training, hard work, and the mental talent required to be at the top of one's game. Tiger Wood's is considered one of the best course tactitians the game has ever known, as was Jack Nicklaus. And dolts generally can't be quarterback, which brings into play, as with Jim, not only knowledge and quick mental reflexes, but leadership.
But the reality kicker about sports is that the best athletes, like the best investment bankers (until recently) and best 11th-grade drop out scrap dealer, can become very rich, while the world's foremost forensic anthropologist, unless she writes a best seller and has a TV series named after her, can only expect to knock down a couple hundred G's a year. When the average .240 hitter or ERA 4.50 mid-inning reliever's base pay in major league baseball is around $375,000 a year, you can imagine cheated a "pretty good" lawyer downtown, or worse, a GS-16 in DOJ, or much worse, the chairman of House Defense Subcommittee (Murtha), must feel!
It's not within my skill level to determine whether the ruling negative sentiment here is hatred, jealousy, disappointment, or that the system is unfair. What I do know is that in these few, these precious few, there does seem to be an internal (sometimes outward) teat-fit a'brewing somewhere, and a real nasty fist being shaken at God. Don't you think?
It's the process that should interest us here. Nailing the athlete is easy. Just make him irrelevant by calling him a jock or Neanderthal and move him outside your contextual world, which is how the effete psychologically already treat Tiger Woods. (Heaven help the right tackle who listened to Verdi with his grandmother.) But the academic world is less easy, for here we actual pit apples against apples (sort of) and this is where that process of redefining key cultural terms begins.
In order to take the world of hard science; mathematics, physics, engineering, and medicine, and demote them over into a less relevant sphere, and a lower "social" class, one has to first pump up that which is left remaining, i.e., the soft sciences such as law, political science, the liberal arts, sociology and psychology. You have to make these seem more important to the culture and civilization (Marx was a master at tapping this sentiment), while obscuring the obvious notion that the sheer "iffiness" of these disciplines (they don't call them "subjective" or "speculative" for nothing) as well as the lesser rigor found in their study, make endeavors in these fields seem more alluring (besides the truly intellectually inquisitive) to the intellectually lazy, who as we have seen, attach themselves to Leftwing resentment like a Siamese twin.
Now I know true geniuses who also occupy those fields and (most of) these are indeed legitimate fields of intellectual pursuit. But we're not working from the top, but the middle down here. Even the head of the Sociology Department at Amherst has to admit, you just don't find lazy bottom feeders in the pre-Med Physiology, Mathematics or Botany stables as you do in Communications, Political Science, Sociology, Journalism and pre-Law. Some people just can't (won't) swim in any pool filled with absolutes...and it has something to do with a fear of failure...that can't be hidden or disguised or dissembled away. Nor will you find spin-off disciplines and departments which have become the home of pseudo-intellectualism in American academe, and the hotbed of Left wing political activism in the Physics Department, or medical school.
Go back fifty years and the relative roles of fact-based scholarship and subjective-based scholarship in America were better defined, and ranked, and theology and philosophy were properly set off into a third class all by themselves. Those classifications are blurred today, the rankings reversed. It is clear fact-based and subjective-based intellectualism have been at each others' throats for years (as we can also see between Rome and Greece, below), the latter now having the upper hand, the third group having to choose sides, so to speak, which has caused civilization to suffer, and placed Liberty at the brink.
And to think, it is all probably because of the Tiger Woods effect, as first expressed by the ancient Greece, and through them, Karl Marx.
From Genius to Insipidity in a short two thousand years
I begin with "genius" because 1) the American Left sees themselves, individually, and by group (law, journalism, academe, helicopter mommies, spoiled brats ) as the inheritors of a true intellectual tradition (which began in Greece), and 2) because the Greeks were the first to become ticked off because they couldn't get the right sort of respect for it.
In the psychology of the American Left, we find a constant stream of cultural substitutions, where advanced degrees, if even in "8mm Cinematography during the FDR Era", is allowed to become synonymous with intellectualism, itself a substitution for "genius". You can see how both terms can become diluted because of the new phony intellectual baggage they've acquired. Among modern liberals intellectualism has become the new cultural substitute for wealth, and through that new wealth, and entitlement to power, and through power, the "right" to lead, which harken back to Marx's fundamental dislike of capitalists. When using logic, this is indeed a torturous thought process. But with modern liberals it seems easy.
Today, all this, when blended into a cocktail of phony self-awareness, and mixed with the commiseration of like-minded individuals, a fellow can feel pretty doggone good about himself without ever having done one single thing of consequence.
This is why lawyers want to sit in the inner councils of corporations, at the center of operations, even if the business is making widgets, about which they know nothing. Psychologically, lawyers see themselves as the hubs of events, no matter where, and yes, in modern affairs, this is a "type" that has proved very painful and costly to us all because of this self-view. It is also why journalists, yet another type, want the story always to be about them, and to be able to bask in the reflected glow of what they think is their creation. It is why faux-intellectuals, unlike the real thing, have a sign reading "Dig Me" stenciled on their forehead. They want to be noticed. They want to be heard. They want to matter, and not on page 247 of the New England Journal of Underwater Basket Weavers.
Today, now that a fellow "intellectual" is in the White House, intellectualism has come to mean little more than being able to filibuster with big words rather than little ones, just a higher form of doing the dozens. News talk shows are filled with this sort, so much so it's not difficult to compare their patter with Oswald Bates (Damon Wayons' fast-talking inmate in "In Living Color') or maybe even better, Leo Gorcey of the Bowery Boys. All that these modern "academicians" have done is "de-mala da propisms", by inserting fully conjugable babble-verbs. In some universities as much as 10% of their degree programs and 20% of course offerings exist only to provide academic fodder to this growing phony self-esteem among America's Cliffs-Notes intellectual under-achievers. (Want to cut costs in education? Start here.)
Yes, I know this borders on anti-intellectualism, and it would if I were targeting true intellectuals. In the 1930s Joseph Goebbels ran a rather successful campaign extolling intelligence (as healthy) and decrying intellectualism (as depraved), but on closer inspection it was shown that the true intellectualism the Nazis set out to get is the same the Left goes after today, i.e, any intellectual pursuit that does not further the goals of the Party and the State...ranging from "common sense" to theology. The Nazis used the "ordinary knowledge" as a straw man, as a broom to sweep out true inquiry, for the Nazis were not dissimilar in academic approach as the modern Left today; lazy, strutting intellectual buffoons.
What we often forget in taking up this cat-call of anti-intellectualism, which both Wilson and FDR used when the situation suited, is the growing breadth of "anti-common sense" sentiment in America. I've never known a single aphorism of common sense to be disproved, except to be declared de classe because of the mouths the wisdom came from. The Left rejects common sense for the same reason John Kerry rejects Philly beef; the mouths it may touch. "If Gomer knows this, it can't be worth knowing", which proves a visceral, elitist dislike the "self-evident", Homer Simpson clause of the Declaration of Independence. "Anti-common sense" is more ancient than anti-intellectualism, and can go the heart of an entire culture, as the Greeks Thinkers first proved.
(You can stop here if all you want to know is what you've always suspected. If you want to know why, read on.)
Genius or Laziness
A British civil servant who served with the Saudi royal family in the 1920s, upon his retirement wrote that the Saudis considered it to be a noble thing to sit around a conference table and discuss and make decisions...but they considered it ignoble to actually have to go out and do the work necessary to acquire the knowledge in order to make those decisions wisely. It was not a compliment.
Of course, being ultra-rich, after a few fits and starts, the Saudis simply hired a staff, who could then give them the short version to carry into the boardroom. Case resolved.
I've often compared the Saudis and their Wahhabi religion to Pentecostal snake handlers in east Tennessee (with some apology to the folks back on Straight Branch) but my first serious question: Do they sound more like Jed Clampett...or the United States Congress in this regard?
My second serious question: So why do we look down our nose at the Clampetts then?
But you have to admit, this is a sweet gig...if you can get it. When you see, or even hear of someone who spends his waking hours like the Saudis, idling about in a toga, on a sunny day, hanging around an outside arena, like a Great Thinker...or a prostitute...you know, with no visible means of support...your first thought is not that they are geniuses, and this is what geniuses do. Your first thought is that they are either very very rich, or very, very lazy. Only after a closer look do you realize this may actually be what they do for a living, and it could actually be a good and useful thing. (Recommended: Go with your gut instinct, first, then work your way back.)
Now no one ever accused the Saudis of being geniuses, although there are a lot of very clever men among them. But we can't help but notice that most recognized geniuses ends up much like the Saudis, sitting on their backsides, pondering issues and ideas of severe gravity, or creating music, literature, art, and generally carrying their talent to the heights (and depths) of intellectual beauty and understanding that transcend the average man. I'm speaking of Sir Elton John, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol here, not Mozart, et al. But you get my drift.
Nor has any libel ever accused the American Left of being genius-ridden. In fact, true intellectualism generally eludes them because of that one fatal flaw, that hole in the soul., just described. It's the attempt to mask this hole that defines their behavior. So this inquiry isn't about genius per se, but rather the dark psychology that attaches itself to genius under certain conditions, for, once genius departs, the psychology still remains.
Two Pyramids and The Greek Teat-Fit
We have described how this resentment has spread through a sub-culture in America, but we have not looked at how it can become a property of an entire culture.
It all began with Greece.
Most cultures have distinct characteristics, enough that some
stereotypical comments can be made about most national peoples. In the Second War the U S government commissioned some prominent anthropologists to create "national profiles" of various countries. For instance the Russians tended to be
ascetic and mean, the Italians frenetic, and the English droll. The Germans were super-efficient and militant. Romans liked to
pinch ladies' behinds, the French fought with their feet and fornicated
with their face, Albanians were thieves and 100% black Africans took care of
their extended families when they became wealthy. And the Japanese were just plain nuts. That sort of thing.
But that was 1941. Cultures can change, as we know from the Russians after 75
years without a church. They are no longer ascetic. Now the Japanese are as placid as Benedictines, Romans still pinch butt, the Italians still chase the moon, but more often in
New Jersey than Naples. Finding a new friend in Bill Clinton the
Albanians found more profit in prostitution than stealing, and east Africans now stand in mute wonder that a half-breed rich son could neglect his entire family there. And the French don't seem to care that much about kick-boxing
anymore.
I recently read a book about ancient technologies, and the author there speculated about the psychology
of the ancient Greeks, who were the first to observe and try to quantify
physical laws, such as motion, speed and volume. The problem was, they
never made much of it. Like philosophy in general, they did it just for the beauty of the thing. In fact, the Pythagoreans believed that mathematics and philosophy were one in the same. (In many respects I agree.). The ancient Greeks regaled in the observation of things, the making
of notes about it all, and later sitting around and talking about it over a cuppa.
But to apply those ideas to reality, they found that a little distasteful, even de classe, according to Plato. And for reasons unknown, they couldn't complete some
mathematical equations, such as describing why or how a rock descends
and slows down once it is thrown. It seems the Greeks had a hard time with "change". (Not sure they even considered "hope".) They only dealt with the force of
acceleration, dismissing almost with disinterest how or why that rock slowed
down and fell. (Interesting stuff, really.)
To the higher Greeks the highest form of civilized art was to observe and speculate and quantify. To them this was beauty, a perfect symmetry, which in their minds (I'm sure 99% of the working Greeks wouldn't agree) created a perfect pyramid, with their intellectual selves at the very vertex of that polygon.
Now, the object of the Greek teat fit were the Romans, who, on the other hand, were builders. They took those Greek
axioms and added their own corollaries, then designed, engineered and built and engineered and built. This is
called "applied science and technology" and the Greeks, well into the
Christian era, before the Turks finally bred the "speculation gene" clean out of them, never forgave the Romans for actually building
things with laws they first discovered.
Seems trivial doesn't it? Still, there you have it, a major nut coming unscrewed on the right front tire of history. So hold this thought, for it is an important one. First, it highlights two basic building blocks to civilization, both of which are absolutely necessary for a culture to rise, theoretical inquiry and applied science. But we learn from the Greeks and Romans that in their essence they are often antithetical to one another, sometimes even at one another's throat.
You see, there was something, invisible to the naked eye, that the Romans did to the Greeks, just by building a bridge or a hot bath, meaning them no harm whatsoever, but still, borrowing their ideas that ticked the Greeks off mightily. And that resentment lasted over a thousand years.
This is why I began my inquiry into America's Hole in the Soul Gang with the Greeks, instead of a mid-century journey with Karl Marx, who was just one of several beneficiaries of this Greek bile.
The first thing you have to understand is the Greeks were right about the beauty of it all. To explain "what is" is a thing of art...but only if you get "is" right. But what they seemed to get wrong was in failing to find a context for these wonders they described. The impracticality of the thing was part of the beauty.
There was a disconnect between their philosophical discoveries and not just practical applications, but practical life. They behaved other-worldly while trying to describe the world, which is kind of like the American media tries to describe America today.
In the end, while the world is in everlasting gratitude for the substance of Greek thinking, its selfish and narcissistic perspective took on a life of it own.
The Greek Pyramid
The Greek thinkers had a high opinion of themselves, and of course, stand highest among their historians, but we don't really know where they stood (sat) in the Greek hierarchy of society. Greece also had commerce, business, politics, crime and war. But in the view of the Greek thinkers, these other activities were an insignificant sideshow. Their pyramid was perfect in design and symmetry. They could only have drawn it better only if they'd had a full length a mirror...only the Romans hadn't invented that yet. See?
With genius, real or self-acclaimed, comes baggage, especially the need for a steady income that requires little work outside the general duties of being a genius. An inheritance, or a rich wife, helps. Genius needs a safe, cozy environment. Genius needs to know someone is cooking the food, making up the bed, sweeping, doing laundry. Our prisons are filled with geniuses who couldn't find this sort of back-up, and weren't born with it. Still thousands more pragmatic geniuses have to take in wash, vacuum carpets, bus tables, or play bass on the midnight shift at the Stork Club in order to get to practice their genius just some of the time, until they are discovered and can get on the Genius Train (the laboratory) or the Celebrity Train (music, the arts).
Nothing in the record shows that the Greek Great Minds had to work for a living. Maybe they were trust babies. Plato seemed to have been one. Still, what drove them toward speculation, versus designing a MixMaster or aircraft carrier? Was it sexier? A club rule? Or did it just fit the country club lifestyle they liked, hanging around the Lyceum? Even John Adams lamented to Abigail that he had to become an expert at politics and law so that his grandchildren could grow up to be expert in the arts.
The Roman Pyramid(s): Team work.
I haven't said much about the Romans, who I don't like any more or less than the Greeks. They also created a pyramid just as symmetrical as the Greeks, and just as filled with snobbery and condescension and class awareness. But because it was based on practical application rather than beauty it was a much more participatory pyramid, which has had a profound effect on available routes for most kinds of genius ever since (Science and technology) and bears considerable importance in understanding modern Hole-in-the-Soul'ism. The Romans created a career path for geniuses who liked to create, and build, and even some times even blow up things. All kinds of stuff. This didn't endear them to the Greeks, as these kinds of people were always getting headlines while speculators and thinkers were showing up on Page 10, or in some dry musty journal at university. If pure thinking was sexier, the babes sure didn't think so. They were always off chasing after the guys on Page One.
You can see, the Greeks were exclusivists in their sense of themselves. The Romans were just as class oriented and snobbish, but couldn't afford to be exclusive, for it took thousands of people to build the things they undertook to build, and not all of those people were gang-labor and slaves. (Roman slaves were, by the way, mostly, white, which started a tradition of white slavery in Europe and Russia that lasted almost 1500 years, by the way, and most white Europeans in America are the children of those slaves, by the way. I digress, not that it matters. It just needs to be said from time to time.)
The Romans created several pyramids instead of one, each based on the intellectual content of that technology. (Trickle-down genius?) Knowledge expands as so do the number of people involved, for, even as one person might still be able to know all the things that need to be done to build a thing, he hasn't enough hands to do it. He has to share.
Now the Romans weren't the first to divide labor. That went back much further, to Egypt and the Fertile Crescent. What the Romans did was broaden and universalize it as far as technology would allow them to take it. They created hundreds of new pyramids, one each for every technology. An aqueduct contained the products of several technologies, just as today a car does...all under the design management of a team of thinkers, who conceived the idea, another team of design managers (engineers, architects), then dozens more teams of specialists, from master masons to carpenters (creating guilds), down to thousands of people who scoured the countryside for just the right kind of sand or clay. Each person, down to the fellows who cut trees...cheap pines for scaffolding, better hardwoods for pilings or anchors...all had specialized knowledge.
And all of them were hirelings, which requires yet another pyramid, actually a polygon, to describe this participation, for they built these things because it was their job to build these things, meaning there was an "invisible hand", some guy back in Rome, maybe a Senator, or even the Emperor, e.g., Trajan, who maybe felt a working aqueduct was a more fitting monument to His Lordship than some stupid old mausoleum, who had commissioned the work.
Besides, there was a return on the investment on the aqueduct, which raises still another interesting question. Was the emperor then the same as the congressman from Minnesota who just wanted his name on a bridge, or was he a kind of entrepreneur? Yes, I know, the emperors were "government", but they were also entrepreneurs in that they got first dibs on the revenues. The Great Pyramids of Egypt never made a dime until three thousand years after they were built. The Appian Way, the aqueducts, the bath houses, all were cash producers from Day One. (And later, non-imperial entrepreneurs would steal that model and really do something even emperors couldn't imagine...and in the process, mess up that pyramidic design.)
Why I drone about this is that it's important to note that something interesting changes in the culture when so many people are involved in a large project. A kind of mutuality evolves, which completely changes the human complexion of the pyramid. First, it isn't so exclusive anymore. It is participatory...if even by necessity.
Now, I'm not saying the genius at the top of a Roman pyramid is going out and tipping back a Lowenbrau with the guys hauling in logs from Tuscany, but understanding cooperation and team work is something the Greeks seemed to lack, even looked down upon, and that seems to have been psychological, not philosophical. Exclusivists tend not to be team players, this we know. Rather they cling to the club.
So we have two perfect pyramids, one in which, at the very top, has 1% of the people knowing all the information that is worth knowing, (in their own humble estimation), the rest immaterial. This pyramid is 99% empty in the mind of its designers. (This is important, for a vacuum never really stays unfilled.)
Wealth and class rank are only implied, but every culture has a pecking order, i.e., how various groups are perceived vis a vis one another, inside that culture. Aside from lawyers, who are always near the bottom (depending on whether prostitutes were legal in that society, and swineherds and privy-dippers were considered professions...or there was a leper colony...you get my drift...) doctors, teachers (philosophers), soldiers, civil servants and merchants all sat in varying positions of social esteem. Wealth clearly wasn't looked down upon, but in Greece, 200 years before Christ and 500 years before the Dark Ages, it was clear that landed wealth was ranked much higher than wealth from buying and selling, or the manufacture of goods (petty bourgeoisie)...which goes to prove that disregard for the Jews in Europe predated their actual appearance there by at least five hundred years.
The Roman pyramid is also perfect, but containing all the information that needs to be known, and which is distributed throughout, rather than contained in the apex. Even the lowest dirt-hauler knows something about building an aqueduct, just by being on the job every day, and can lay some claim to having built it, no more, no less than those high steel welders who helped build the Golden Gate Bridge. Trickle-down pride and accomplishment changes culture...for the better, I've always assumed. "Be he ne'er so vile, gentle shall his condition be..." (Henry V)
Two very different pyramids, indeed, which beyond the pure intellectual content, were both based on the practical psychology implicit in the design.
Knowing this, and trying to look at the world the way the Greeks did, you can imagine how they seethed...for centuries it
seemed. I'm not taking sides, for as I said, both the Roman and Greek
lines of thinking are necessary to civilization, but it does seem,
since Aristotle, the Greeks were on the short end of the stick in
getting the respect they thought they deserved. After Alexander
died, (for dallying with too many dillies), no
matter how smart they were, they were almost always a subservient
people, first to the Romans, then to the Byzantines, who were GINOS
(Greek in name only), and then the Turks, who turned the Greeks into a
people who looked like Anthony Quinn and Irene Pappas instead of Troy
Donahue and Virna Lisi.
(The American Pyramid, an interjection)
Now Karl Marx would attempt to create another pyramid of perfect symmetry later on, only, as we've seen in America, it is standing upside down, since 99.9% of all the knowledge about Marxism that exists, and can be known, is known only to 1% or less of it's practitioners. It is the absolute reversal of the Greek pyramid.
You can imagine how an entrepreneur, worse a Jim-like entrepreneur, can distort the symmetry of the Marxian pyramid. You have to understand that in Marx's worldview, like the Greeks, engineers and architects and bankers were all as the modern Left sees them, tools to capitalists, and just as villainous. Once you can make that "intellectual" leap (deconstructive thinking) you can create the American Left on a cookie platter simply by adding baking soda and popping in a pre-heated oven for twenty minutes, much like Sauron baked orcs.
The Marxian Fairness Doctrine: A Brief History of History from 200 BCE to 1840 A D
In all fairness to them, the Greeks didn't bring fairness into it. I did...because Karl Marx did.
Still, implicit in their resentment (or as I called it, the teat
fit) against the Roman was a sense of unfairness. They had been violated.
As I mentioned, the Turks had completely bred the "speculation gene" out of the Greeks, so it left and found a home in Germany. And with it went some of that psychology, for the German petrie dish was perfect for yet another try at ending the fundamental unfairness the Greeks had suffered through for five centuries, and Man had suffered under since the rise of feudalism. The Germans also had a keen sense of fairness, only philosophy had become something different in those colder surroundings...as different as Apollo was to Dionysius.
In the 5th Century Europe fell into tribal savagery as Rome became weaker and moved to the Bosphorus. Finally Charles I (Charlemagne) secured the Holy Roman Empire around 800 under the Franks...instituting the feudal system and the rise of a nobility passed on by land ownership (gained by military might) and birthright rather than merit. Both of these notions are significant, and the fact they arose side-by-side even more so.
New kingdoms rose and fell, but the umbrella of feudalism stayed put...(actually no one knew how to undo it...like state health care in England)...until the middle ages finally evolved into the early renaissance in Italy, thence outward to the rest of Europe. Before this time, intellectual inquiry was mostly a church-run affair, the whole feudal thing really a kind of anathema to the soul of Church, but as I said, who could undo it? After a few hundred years the Church just sort of threw up its hands and melted into the framework. (You need to bone up on feudalism, for even as it was about as heartless a social structure as you can imagine, and just as bad as the baddest kind of communism, it was also very appealing to the folks at the upper ends, the elites. More than that, unlike communism, it lasted over a thousand years. In other words feudalism had a chemistry modern socialists would very much like to bottle. Hold that thought, too.) At some point the Church realized that undoing feudalism would have undone it as well, making the decisiveness of the Church in Rome much the same as modern Republicans. So, they did nothing, hoping, waiting, praying for that change in both anticipation and fear. Right on cue, it come from within and below, which turned out to be some German friar named Martin Luther. In Germany.
What Luther launched, besides all kinds of different churches in east Tennessee, was a very Roman thing. He spread the wealth of the intellect, so to speak...without force, which is a good thing, so don't mix him up with Democrats or Karl Marx. He took the language of learning to the people by publishing the Bible in German instead of Latin. This sped up the process by which intellectual inquiry would leave the Church and move into the secular sector. For five hundred years most scholarship had resided in the church (and their monasteries) where, according to Chesterton, it was saved from barbarism. But by the 12th Century universities outside the Church had begun to pop up and Martin Luther sped that process up immeasurably.
Almost everyone thought feudalism was bad (that's how the Dark Ages got their name), but some of them were also saying that whole divine-right-of-kings-royalty-birthright-and-privilege thingymajig was also a bad thing, not just the system of land ownership that overrode the whole stinking mess. But without a fief, one could not be a nobleman, but just another rich guy, the noblemen said. It was someone at some secular university who opined "So what?", and thus a revolution was begun.
Much of this talk was in Germany, as I said, where feudalism was more susceptible to fracture because they never had a strong unified state in the first place, just a lot of smaller principalities. Unlike France, they'd never had an emperor or empire, and unlike Italy, they never had sunny beaches and la dolce vita. (When you think of 13th century Germany think of 15 or 16 little Texases, all of which had been independent countries at one time, but without the haciendas and black-eyed senoritas.) Greek philosophy, once freed from the monastic libraries, fled to Germany in the 18th Century, as did the Greek notion of exclusivism, in part because German style capitalism had also found an early home there, since it was less welcome among the royal lands in France and the beach resorts in Italy. (Historians also mention the Germans were also just naturally more industrious.)
So it was that German philosophers began to look upon royal privilege as a thing whose time had come long before it had actually come....only, in German minds, even in German philosophers' minds, these weren't necessarily libertarian notions as we know them. From the git-go, the Germans wanted to replace the old order with a new order, with the emphasis on ORDER, a well-engineered, well-managed order, which, as we all know, is a template into which individual liberty and free markets' just don't fit. In typical Greek fashion, the Germans got the wrong right and the right wrong, for you see, these inheritors of the Greek philosophical tradition also inherited their disposition, linking unfairness more to their own inward view of self rather than outward, to the real victims of bad people. German intellectuals had that same Greek ax to grind; namely the rise of that wealthy class who, while not exactly C-students, were still their intellectual lessers. To the poor, the plight of the workers, they were, and generally still are, indifferent.
Karl Marx: Resentment Justified
Karl Marx was like the Wright brothers and Darwin, in that he just got to the plate first. Dozens more were looking for the same thing, when he and Frederich Engels penned The Communist Manifest in 1848, thus becoming household names, at least in the Slytherins' side of Hogwarts.
I used to believe that Karl Marx saw real injustice in the world, as the plight of the worker in the capitalist world of Germany in the mid-19th Century was really pretty bad. I just thought then he didn't know which end of the rifle the round came out of (which was true) and was rather stupid about connecting the dots about Man's potential, so I never inquired as to whether there might be some underlying gripe in the way he saw the world...until I read Thomas Sowell's biography, which depicted a type of person we all know very well in our own world today, and can spot in just about every period of history, even in better fiction and film. Like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Karl Marx's uniqueness was as shallow as a pool of warm pee. Yes, he was a genius, most likely. But he was still a type, a very ordinary type. Even Marx's best biographers
could only describe him in his formative scholastic years as a petulant
little sunavabitch in a general sort of way. He was a jerk, or as the Japanese say, a "plick".
What Marx did, of course, was come up with an idea that was so bodacious in scope, and described so eloquently in an undecipherable secret-decoder ring jargon of a masonic ritual that it immediately reached out and grabbed by the throat and shook academicians holding almost exactly the same petulant, can't-get-no-respect world view. It truly did throttle the academy.
To understand what Marx had "discovered", by comparison, imagine me announcing to the world that I had developed a ray gun with only three movable parts, and which cost only $150 to produce. With a sympathetic press, the air would be filed with people wondering what this new gun would mean to warfare as we know it, and would it be a good thing for only the United States to have it? How would it effect women and children? People of color? The poor? Would China copy it? North Korea? What about the ray gun gap?
After only a few days of this rising tide of inquiry into the ethical, philosophical and demographic risks run by this new weaponry, one or two reporters, (I'm sure Bob Novak would've been one) looking back over their notes would pause to ask "But will it work? Where does it say it works?" Too late. They would have been swamped by the enormity and sensation of it all, the media steamroller headed in another direction altogether. A few weeks later, the Ray Gun story will have taken on a life of its own, so no one would notice the Friday evening news release that mentioned that one of the three moving parts must be a 1/8" thick rubber band that must turn two million revolutions per second and last 2000 hours before being replaced, and that it must be run by a battery the size of an aphid's egg....neither of which exists except in the very fertile mind of a single man. Me.
If you don't believe only the Ray Gun-blueprint part, I give you Karl Marx. If you don't believe the ability of the press to totally ignore critical thinking and scientific fact in creating a myth out of whole cloth, I give you Al Gore. So think again. As a working system, my idea of a ray gun is a fraud. But as a con...it's not that far-fetched.
That's how Communist Manifesto hit the academic world in 1848, like a typhoon. Karl Marx had a theory that he couched in just the right language to
excite a narrow segment of his society, and the magic swept like
wildfire, so that no one actually stopped to ask "Will it work?" It didn't matter. He was blazing a trail through uncharted woods (or so he believed) so there was no history of other road maps to gauge it by. Speculations are so much fun when there is nothing to test them with. The press, we've found, love stories that can't be proved or disproved. By the 1860s the story, er, theory, had already become too big to fail. Professors in Stockholm and Edinburgh were naming their sons Karl.
(Not quite pertinent to this inquiry...the genesis of the "liberal" seed...Marx probably deluded himself into believing that he was moving one step beyond capitalism, which itself was one step beyond feudalism. He even said so. But in fact, and in light of 1) the now proven mechanical failure of socialism's "unbreakable" rubber band, bureaucracy, and 2) the real underlying psychological purpose for socialism in the first place, described here, in order to succeed and create a system that will survive a thousand years, modern Marxism has to return back to a kind of feudalism, thus completing a circle back to the Carolingians and the stupid French, not adding an extension to history.
(Capitalism, as America redefined it, and which Karl Marx never inquired into, being a bookish sort and there not being a lot of literature on the subject, provided all the answers to his query about the uplifting of the common man and worker. In a word that answer was "Jim", only our Jim was already his personification of a "common" which ate at his, and his kind's, very soul. So it wouldn't have mattered.)
All society can be stereotyped to some degree according to
class. Like so many with a philosophical, and pseudo-philosophical bent who came after him, Marx was from the middle class. Not the first born, with touches of wealth from time to time, well
educated, even as a younger schoolboy he showed signs of an interest in
speculative philosophy. His world and his experiences were defined
entirely by his academic life which began in 1835 and never really
ended. A career student, he managed to father several children, all
dutifully kept by his wife, and paid for by the charity of parents and
friends. His idea of work was being an editor of a revolutionary
newspaper, which almost nobody read. He never gave a carriage a lube,
cleaned the streets, shucked corn, cut hay, or flipped burgers to help
pay his, or the family's way anywhere....just like P J O'Rourke at a comparable age. But hey, P
J turned out OK.
Beside my interest in Karl Marx's animus toward
capitalism, and his indifference to the working classes, I find his absolute lack of any first
hand knowledge about either of them instructive. If he wanted to know about the poor, he went
to the library and read up on it, from authors he'd come to know and
respect, then closed his eyes and tried to imagine the misery they
felt...if he'd been in their shoes.
(If any of this seems familiar, I suggest you do a demographic on the typical left-wing bottom feeder today. Just delete "library" and insert "Wikipedia".) He eventually did try
to understand capitalism (but after he'd declared war on
it) and sure enough, trod off to the library to see see what others
said about it.
In short, if all the things Karl Marx hated were bulls, he still never
grabbed a single one by the horn in his entire life. Exit common sense, left.
What we can say almost for sure about Karl Marx is
that had his old man, anywhere between the ages of nine and fourteen
given him a rake and a bucket and told him go up and down the street cleaning peoples' yards for a few pfennigs, the world as we know it would
not be quite the same. This terrible maladie des enfants corumpus would be called Schmidtism, or somesuch, and Lenin and those who came after him would have all been "schmidtened" by it. Oh well.
Alack and alas. C'est la vie.
All history since Karl Marx has been the tale of one man after another trying to retro-fit Karl Marx's square pegs into the round holes of humanity based on their own particular grievances and an absolute misunderstanding of the common man's potential. The greatest sadness of Marxism, in fact, is that there have been millions of genuinely caring (but otherwise lazy) young humanists, who truly did feel the pain of the poor and down trodden, only to find the leftward path so filled with easy feelings and devoid of true intellectual rigor, that they just had to take that trail...from which few were able to return. And some of the headline cases, like Lenin, simply weren't allowed back.
While capitalism, in the hands of merciless men, could bleed Man bone dry, Marx only required that his soul be gutted like a fish. Of his successors, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was probably the best, for his mind was equal to Marx, some say even better. I also believe Lenin was less vain, as he was able to finally able to see it wouldn't work, which is when they decided to do him in (many Russians also believe this)....which goes to prove that once a lie becomes so big, there is no limit to what men might do to protect the charade...and their rice bowls.
What unified them all, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Allende (you thought I was going to say Obama), is what unifies them still; that underlying misunderstanding and/or resentment about Jim. Marx laid open a hole in the human soul that Christianity had tried for a millenia to keep under wraps, and made it as feel-good legitimate as flowers on Mother's Day. He made the Seven Deadly Sins co-equal to the Seven Cardinal Virtues. Envy, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth (heavy on the sloth), Wrath,
Pride and Lust. The modern Left magnifies these and even glorifies
them. It wallows in them. And Karl Marx did a pretty good job of making
them seem respectable, probably for the first time since Gomorrah was
thrown down.
Karl Marx was not god-like, but Marxism is religious-like in its psychopathy. He had too high a regard for himself to think he was just a con artist or Das Kapital-thumping tent revivalist. Still, modern Leftism represents the dark side of man's soul, bowing before the Seven Deadly Sins as icons. Regardless of their platitudes, they give themselves away with their tone, the body language, the sneer, the scowl, the clipped words...and my favorite, the shrill she-b**ch Banshee scream of Code Pink..
This is why modern liberalism has little to do with politics. It is a religion or pathology, your choice. But even love, when accelerating beyond the scale of normal human expression, can fall into madness. That's why the Church invented monasteries and convents...to sort all that out. It seems the university hasn't worked out quite as well. Or maybe it has.
It's time to end this.
I could have made this much simpler had I simply said the modern liberal is filled with envy and spite and hatred for those who can and do "do". That hole in their soul, maybe they're born with it, maybe it's learned very early on. But I'd wager on the latter. Like the Greeks, being smart stands on its own in their minds. No "achievement" ticket needs to be punched.
To be sure, there's a ranking. It may seem like I've described here only the lowest echelons, the bottom feeders, the rank and file. But there are ranks that actually bathe regularly, put on make-up, can tie a Windsor knot, and don't break out in hives by putting on leather shoes. But the same resentment exists as rank trickles up. More than a few have PhD's, but most, as described early on in this essay, are from a pseudo-intellectual in-group, the product of obscure, almost clandestine cells which, like the Manhattan Project, is a university budget line item with a need-to-know asterisk.
Even the most radical of Obama's current czars, at their root, have a "get-even" mentality that goes back to their early youth, built on jealousy or resentment for not being treated fairly. All of them see themselves as better equipped, and more entitled, to manage other mens' affairs...never, never having seriously inquired into that whole "ordinary men can do it themselves" theme of the Constitutional founders. In my day, the 1960s, the "free man" notion was at least offered up, but in the general contrarian alienism of the time, merely rejected. Today, most of America's youth don't even know "true liberty" is even an option. Their resentment is more visceral and far less intellectual....absolutely no noblesse in their oblige and no oblige in their noblesse.
Of course, modern liberalism takes on a different aspect, as one grow up and take on a specific cause. Environmentalists sees one kind of bogeyman, (actually several), race-baiters, still others. Trial lawyers hate doctors as much as they hate that high-school C-student who now hauls in millions selling scrap. Doctors rub their noses in it, for they are really smart, and get more respect from the people who count. Like JFK to John Kerry, doctors are the real deal.
My purpose here has been to try to mine the deepest resources of the Leftist soul, which is why I began with the Greeks, who began with speculative thinking as art and true philosophy. But when their ideas were turned into a physical reality, given three choices; applause, neutral silence, or sulking, they made a cultural choice to select the teat fit.
I also selected the Greeks because they carried out their "sciences" in physical security. They were mostly wealthy, of the inherited kind, didn't have to work, or get their hands dirty in any way, unless they liked gardening or wenching as sports. (It's the only two I could think of. Even I don't think changing the oil on the chariot is fun.) This Greek "way" would naturally appeal to those at the other end of the economic spectrum whose intellectual inquiries were defined less by their wealth and more by their propensity for idling about, indoors. In short, the Greek "life-style" appeals to the lazy under-achiever as well as the bright, active mind.
As we have seen, the university became a suitable substitute for having a daddy who owned 100 hectares of vineyards. As a job, it is a an easy gig. There was some regimen and work, but only a minimal amount, and as we've seen in liberal arts, that is become easier and easier. To some extent it can be laid at Karl Marx's feet that so many universities host entire departments whose sole purpose is to propagate still other departments, and professors and students in other universities.
But for even easier gigs, try on government work, especially if you can climb into management. It is also to Karl Marx's credit that the state class, the public sector, the bureaucracy, also have expanded and proliferated as they have. They are Marxism's ultimate undoing, and I don't see any well-lit road back to feudalism under Obama'ism, still, it's a great place to build an army of minions. The state sector is where those unable to master the masters and doctoral programs at Phoenix (on-line) University, and don't like the blue vests at Best Buy, take their B.A.'s to practice their idleness and bask in the 73 degree mid-summer heat of the Agriculture Department Building on Independence Avenue.
Anything but retail.
There you have it. The circle is complete.
Vassar Bushmills