The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Power

Posted on | March 12, 2012 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

This is the unifying theme of the Ruling Class: acquisition, excercise, and retention of political power, at the expense of the individual. This post is me thinking out loud about how the Ruling Class views the populace.
Existence, in brief
Consider the human existential situation. We have to start with the individual before discussing the group. No one doubts the existence of our bodies, male and female, possessed of body, mind, and, arguably, ‘soul’.
The body is an emotional ‘bag of meat’, as Olbermann put it. Instincts, reaction, hormones, all mashed up together.
Things become quickly ambiguous past that. The mind is a fine tool; the pinnacle of creation according to Ayn Rand. And the soul may have some catalytic effect on the maturation and health of the body and mind. However, religion is within the scope of this essay insofar as it can become a tool or obstacle to power.
Taking the body, mind and soul together, we can related them to Maslow’s hierarchy.

The soul is self-actualization; the mind is about esteem* and love/belonging; and the body about safety and physiological concerns. It should be pointed out that Maslow’s hierarchy is an abstract model, not ‘constant’ across people like two eyes and ten fingers.
Some people, by a fluke of nature, are just mindless whore-hoppers. Chalie Sheen’s childish hedonism lacks much in the way of intellect, and is bereft of soul. The hyper-materialist may discount the soul entirely. People of this ilk seem trapped in a perpetual childhood. While they may speak, they rarely mature to the point of serious abstraction, useful adulthood, or leadership in the community.
People don’t scale
Those meat bags don’t stack. You can freeze them, but then they get icy. What means can be used to assert control over non-trivial numbers of people? How can they be subjugated by the power of the state? Le Bon offers some profound psychological insights into people in bulk. In terms of Maslow, think of a crowd as a plane filled with pyramids of the tiered variety in varying stages of completion. The overall intellect and soul adds inversely like electrical resistance in parallel. The whole population is a little bit dumber and slightly more soulless than the most godless hedonist out there trading flesh for drug hits.
But there is much political power to be derived from these masses! Keep them fed and pleasured, and they are docile as sheep. Park a bunch of voilent hippies in public places, and mature dissent can be chilled. The vast, law abiding, rationally ignorant lumpen proletariat isn’t the problem. Rather, it is those pesky individuals with their de-stabilizing creativity, their blogs. The biggest obstacle to amassing power remains that 100+ year old Constitution. The lumpen proletariat has long since lost the ability to understand that antique English. But those Founding Fathers, in their diabolical way, set about keeping those individuals at liberty. And that punky Tea Party minority refuses to be shouted down.
How to destroy the individual
So that plane of pyramids, as the society reproduces, must be trained to halt their growth at the lowest, fleshy level. The spiritual and intellectual levels must be attacked and leveled, so that humans can be reduced to child-like contentedness.
Gramsci’s long march is exactly what I am talking about here. All of the various societal institutions, public and private (schools to churches), abstract and concrete (families to industry), stand significantly diminished in the last century. The gift of freedom of speech has been used to destroy, not edify. Science has been used both to fund cronies and to spread guilt and fear. To demolish, not to build. You have Sandra Fluke pretending to argue about rights while in fact pleading for single payer health care. I could go on. Stephen R. C. Hicks goes through the philosophical basis for the attack on the mind and spirit, as Postmodernism has served up a series of corrosive contradictions.
All of this has gone on while stealing from future generations to bind them in a perpetual debt slavery and childhood. The nanny state pretends to love and feeds off of this mass.
Conclusion
There isn’t much new in this essay. It re-connects some existing dots, and offers a model for the motive of the Left that has a great deal of explanatory power. They hate you. They hate your face. Specifically, they are against all intellectual and spiritual aspects of individuality.
There is no punting in the struggle for liberty. Freedom of speech, freedom of religious expression, freedom to defend yourself, the very freedom to exist past conception, is at stake.

Update: some excellent linkage:

*Please link this post. Please.

Category: Politics

Comments

20 Responses to “Power”

  1. Maslow and the Hierarchies « Andrew J. Patrick
    March 12th, 2012 @ 10:58 am

    […] at Other McCain, Smitty draws on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to discuss the blunt truth that the collective has no soul, and indeed must destroy the souls of individuals in order to perpetuate itself. So that plane of […]

  2. In Perpetuity? Not Hardly…. | Daily Pundit
    March 12th, 2012 @ 11:00 am

    […] Perpetuity? Not Hardly…. Posted on March 12, 2012 8:00 am by Bill Quick Power : The Other McCain All of this has gone on while stealing from future generations to bind them in a perpetual debt […]

  3. The Council of Guardians « The Rio Norte Line
    March 12th, 2012 @ 11:12 am

    […] Caution: Smitty link attached. 55.957870 -3.199357 Share this:FacebookEmailPrintRedditTwitterStumbleUponDiggLinkedInLike this:Like2 bloggers like this post. Posted in: Liberty, Obama, Politics ← The 3 Year Apology Tour Another Prediction Comes True → 2 Responses “The Council of Guardians&#8221 → […]

  4. Is God Necessary to Liberty? « The Rio Norte Line
    March 12th, 2012 @ 11:13 am

    […] Caution: Smitty link attached. 55.957870 -3.199357 Share this:FacebookEmailPrintRedditTwitterStumbleUponDiggLinkedInLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. Posted in: Culture, Liberty ← It’s Not a Fluke: The Choice is the EIB or HBO Obama Administration Shows Religious Favoritism in Health Care Bill? → 54 Responses “Is God Necessary to Liberty?&#8221 → […]

  5. What Comes After Post-Modernism? Post Post-Modernism? « The Rio Norte Line
    March 12th, 2012 @ 11:14 am

    […] Caution: Another Smitty link attached. 55.957870 -3.199357 Share this:FacebookEmailPrintRedditTwitterStumbleUponDiggLinkedInLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. Posted in: Culture ← Freedom, Equality and “Progressivism” Milestone Achieved → 5 Responses “What Comes After Post-Modernism? Post Post-Modernism?&#8221 → […]

  6. Michael Smith
    March 12th, 2012 @ 11:18 am

    Linking command executed, sir.

    It has become an accepted canard of the stars of “progressivism”, a sort of conventional wisdom, that everything is relative to the demands and desires of contemporary society and there are no constraints except what they decide there are. The sycophants who orbit these “progressive stars” accept this supposition uncritically because it sounds good to them – why wouldn’t we want to be able to release ourselves from the constricting effects of a prior epoch and adjust our thinking to fit modern times and modern sensibilities? After all, that is the definition of “progress”, isn’t it?

    I would suggest that there are actually very few people in the United States who are what one would call “hard core progressives” and that the greater population that are counted as “progressive” or “liberal” are basically political hangers on – people devoid of enough intellectual curiosity to truly examine the roots of their beliefs. They are not concerned with the philosophical underpinnings, just what the result of “progressivism” means to them…and as “progressivism” is a form of collectivism; it has been very, very good to some.

    If they did examine the roots of “progressivism”, they would understand that there is absolutely nothing American about it and it actually is in complete opposition to the very founding principles of our nation.

    I say this without equivocation and fear of contradiction – bestowing legitimacy on “progressivism” as a part of American politics, the acceptance of “progressivism” and its purveyors as valid leaders of this country is the precursor to the elimination of individual freedom and self-determination and will ultimately lead to the destruction of America.

  7. Different Schools of Thought « The Rio Norte Line
    March 12th, 2012 @ 11:18 am

    […] Caution: Another Smitty link attached. 55.957870 -3.199357 Share this:FacebookEmailPrintRedditTwitterStumbleUponDiggLinkedInLike this:Like3 bloggers like this post. Posted in: Marxism/Communism/Socialism, Obama, Politics ← The “Progressive” Position on Freedom Sign Iowahawk’s Petition → 8 Responses “Different Schools of Thought&#8221 → […]

  8. A Guy From Lithia Springs
    March 12th, 2012 @ 11:34 am

    A nice little stew you’re cooking.   Toss in bits of conspiracy here, a  dash of intellectual analysis.  Sprinkle liberally with envy and anger and voila! I never get used to the negative mindset of those of the right.  So negative.   Conspiratorial.   There’s this shadowy “they” out there.    The right claims to love their country, but it seems like they hate most of the people who live in it……. 

  9. Pathfinder's wife
    March 12th, 2012 @ 11:59 am

    Good essay…but the idiot from Lithia does make one point: there are people on the right who are just as guilty as the left, and they use the same methods, just make different appeals.  Where he goes wrong is in believing that his side are the noble, white knights (haha, sucker; you’ve been had same as the rest of us!).

    Let us not forget the erstwhile Benjamins and Tommies out there (Orwell and Kipling were a very perceptive men), but they don’t count and never will.
    The only peace and justice a person can hope for is the cold one of the grave.

  10. smitty
    March 12th, 2012 @ 12:30 pm

    I had changed it to “Ruling Class” at the outset. I see I missed the “Left” in the conclusion.

  11. smitty
    March 12th, 2012 @ 12:31 pm

    I see that I missed the edit in the conclusion.
    After drafting this, I realized it pertains to the Right as much as the Left, and made it Ruling Class in the intro.
    Thus, while my bias is visible, hopefully my lack of illusion about the GOP is clear.

  12. smitty
    March 12th, 2012 @ 12:32 pm

    it seems like they hate most of the people who live in it……. 
    This isn’t about hating anyone. Rather, loving liberty, and calling out those who’d steal it.

  13. Michael Smith
    March 12th, 2012 @ 12:34 pm

    It is about “progressivism” in its many forms, Republican and Democrat. They both are equally as lethal.

  14. Bob Belvedere
    March 12th, 2012 @ 1:55 pm

    Well put.  The creators of the Progressive Movement in this country specifically said that their goal was to undermine The Constitution and The Declaration through changing the way they were thought about by the American people.  At this they have been quite successful. 

    Such a desire is, at best, Moral Treason. 

  15. Bob Belvedere
    March 12th, 2012 @ 2:04 pm

    If the GOP and the Right are to be blamed in any way, it should be for allowing the infection of Leftist Thinking to invade their hearts, minds, and souls.

    Before the Progressive Movement began to be popular in America with the Anti-Saloon Movement and the rise of labor unions, Americans, no matter the political party, were right-of-center in their basic philosophy [even Jefferson who held some beliefs that were clearly Leftist].

    The Progressive Movement [later the Liberal Movement] began to triumph because (1) it assumed the role of Santa Clause, handing out toys and allowing everyone to be as a child for most of their lives and (2) conducting their long march through our institutions via stealth.

  16. Stakes On The Grill « The Camp Of The Saints
    March 12th, 2012 @ 2:24 pm

    […] It is well worth a read and I know he would love to hear your thoughts on it. […]

  17. Power « That Mr. G Guy's Blog
    March 12th, 2012 @ 6:08 pm

    […] Power. […]

  18. Bob Belvedere
    March 12th, 2012 @ 8:01 pm

    We five…We happy five…are pretty excellent, now that you mention it.

  19. Is Frances Fox Piven Irregular? : The Other McCain
    March 18th, 2012 @ 10:55 am

    […] the surge isn’t what’s important. Rather, the direction. As I was saying the other day, people like Piven are about power. The talk of money, itself, is mis-direction. It isn’t as though the Left is doing anything […]

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