Read on Twitter
Some inchoate thoughts that have been circling in my degrading noggin for a while, now.
I was 18 when I first set foot in a foreign country other than US-lite (Ontario, Canada, sorry non-Quebecois Canadians, you know it's true) was the USSR.
We were firmly in the middle of the middle class, my mom having just climbed out of blue collar redneck status.
We were firmly in the middle of the middle class, my mom having just climbed out of blue collar redneck status.
I grew up rural Appalachian with all that implies. There was a former Imperial Wizard of the KKK living in the town my grandparents lived in.
I was intimately familiar with the barbarians our society rests upon. I heard their rock-solid certainty in their beliefs and saw the slavish devotion to alt-right ideologues in the name of independent thinking.
This was the fertile ground Rush Limbaugh plowed when he came along
This was the fertile ground Rush Limbaugh plowed when he came along
On the other side, my dad's family were more recent immigrants, mostly German. Much more educated.
But.
My grandmother, who never worked, and trapped in an unhappy marriage she sought to mentally escape, wound up falling into the orbit of the Liberty Lobby.
But.
My grandmother, who never worked, and trapped in an unhappy marriage she sought to mentally escape, wound up falling into the orbit of the Liberty Lobby.
I was protected from the above mentioned idiocy by a couple of things my parents did. One, we wound up in a Black church. So the Klan really never had a chance to even get me to glance their way.
Two, my dad introduced me to Holocaust survivors (I had one as a German teacher), so the denialism that infused every issue of The Spotlight made me dismiss their point of view, although I read their articles with interest - interest in why intelligent people believe horse shit.
Thus was born my fascination with goofy shit like $cientology (which I have been studying for 30 years, now), which is really a lifelong quest to understand how my grandmother - rational and kind in other ways - got sucked into that nonsense.
Fast forward to my freshman year in High School and ACE reprinted Silver Age novels, including the entire collected works of H. Beam Piper. Little Fuzzy sucked me in, but the money quote for purposes of this thread comes from Space Viking. It's one I am fond of repeating:
"All societies rest on a barbarian base".
Based on my real life experiences, this line hit home. I intuitively knew what Piper was trying to say, and I agreed. I still do.
Strongmen try to surf the waves of passion in that base to power, but once in power, recognizing how the foundation of their power consists of fickle and illogical minds, they need terror and oppression to keep it occupied.
Such barbarian minds almost never have a rich inner life - no passions to occupy their time - and constantly need the excitement of sports and adversarial politics to add meaning to their lives.
Being simple-minded emotional thinkers, they are a powder keg waiting for a fuse if not kept damp with bread and circuses.
But they are arrogant - so arrogant - about what they think they know, and the rightness of their point of view.
But they are arrogant - so arrogant - about what they think they know, and the rightness of their point of view.
Drs. Dunning and Kruger have provided an exceptional description of the authoritarian thought process.
Fast forward to college, and I am in a pretty unique Russian program emphasizing technical Russian & Soviet culture.
I study the mechanics of Stalin's rise: how the General Secretary - a lowly position before Stalin - became a powerful post by dint of controlling local elections
I study the mechanics of Stalin's rise: how the General Secretary - a lowly position before Stalin - became a powerful post by dint of controlling local elections
I saw how manipulative he was, and I also noted his lack of erudition, his coarseness, and his defensiveness about that and his incomplete command of Russian in his younger days.
But I didn't truly grok that dynamic.
But I didn't truly grok that dynamic.
Not until I wound up in an unusual exchange program that dumped me into a construction crew in the middle of Moscow, observing the business end of the Soviet economy from the perspective of a truly disposable worker (the Student Workers Brigades, the only seasonal work available)
There, I encountered the on-the-job drunkenness that the USSR was famous for.
What surprised me, though, was the totally familiar Gopnik equivalents of the Klan rednecks I had escaped.
I had expected cowed and defeated people at the bottom of Soviet society.
What surprised me, though, was the totally familiar Gopnik equivalents of the Klan rednecks I had escaped.
I had expected cowed and defeated people at the bottom of Soviet society.
Instead I found the Gopniks swallowing propaganda, not because everything was censored and they had no other recourse: samizdat was alive and well.
No. They parroted the Party line because the flattery of their prejudices set in motion by Stalin in order to keep people from noticing he was a coarse, uneducated, Georgian version of Nikolas II was still the bread and butter of Soviet messaging.
No one dared challenge it until Gorby started his anti-alcoholism campaign, and that's ultimately what precipitated Gorby's fall from power.
The hard liners thought they could get the Gopniks on their side if they promised a return to the vodka-soaked Soviet status quo, but the genie of reform was too far out of the bottle by then.
Even in the midst of those chaotic reforms the Gopniks thought they had all the answers.
"Я *все* знаю"
"I know *everything*"
How many times did I hear that phrase? Too many to mention.
The same Dunning Kruger certainty of the Klansman in my grandparents' town.
"Я *все* знаю"
"I know *everything*"
How many times did I hear that phrase? Too many to mention.
The same Dunning Kruger certainty of the Klansman in my grandparents' town.
And slowly I realized that Stalin did not have the ironclad power base I had always assumed. That the West's view of him as omnipotent Oriental potentate was wrong, dismissive, and probably racist. (Scratch a Russian...).
Stalin's tactics are *exactly* the same as those of the Southern planter-turned-business-magnate class that LBJ described:
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
These barbarians have *always* lived among us. I'm not sure, short of eugenics, how we eliminate what I consider to be the existential threat of probably 1/3 of the human race.
Much of the excesses of strongmen are actually an attempt to keep their power at bay. This is the essence of Xi's desecration of Communism in favor of his new Nationalism.
The best a Democracy can do is try to skim off the top layers of this class of Barbarians and make at least semi-decent human beings out of them through education and good examples.
But also by, let's be honest, bribing them with a middle class lifestyle, the rewards of which they probably don't deserve.
But when they are fat, dumb and happy, absorbed in bread and circuses, they have less motivation to cause civil unrest. Sure, they'll bitch like Archie Bunker, but they won't do anything until you take away their sense of wellbeing and vague superiority.
But if you allow free reign of sociopaths at the top of democracy - allow the rich to remove all fetters on their pursuit of profit to the point of vast inequality that threatens those self-satisfied barbarians at the bottom with the spectre of having no one to look down on?
Well, look around you. This is what you get.
We have to do better for all our people, to reduce inequality and provide opportunities for all, because it's the right thing to do.
We have to do better for all our people, to reduce inequality and provide opportunities for all, because it's the right thing to do.
Because it's a crime against humanity to deny a potential Einstein in Dorchester the education to reach her full utility to mankind and in the process live a happy and fulfilling life, simply because we can't be assed to make sure the racists in Boston have a decent school system
But we also have to do this because it blunts an existential threat.
A good third of humanity in every country, in every society, in every culture, drives it into conflict with every other country, society and culture.
A good third of humanity in every country, in every society, in every culture, drives it into conflict with every other country, society and culture.
And, unfortunately, whether we like it or not, a good fraction of our governmental efforts must be dedicated to keeping this third of us in check. Or it will drive us to ruin.
This thread is probably depressing as hell. I'm too cynical to judge.
And I don't have many of the answers.
But framing the question correctly is half the battle, right?
Right?
And I don't have many of the answers.
But framing the question correctly is half the battle, right?
Right?
