Progressives are projectors. They are often enough the authoritarian-thinkers. It's all they see when they look out but they don't realize they're forcing an internal pattern recognition onto the world and not the world forcing it onto them, sort of like a cheating spouse becoming suspicious their partner is cheating on them. It can approach levels resembling paranoia. I don't know if it's too much time online or what, but this critical error in projection that they cannot stop making, creates a momentum of bad analysis that appears on its surface to be logical, since it follows the pattern they've projected onto it, but is totally illogical and does not withstand scrutiny. But how could they step back and acknowledge the projection now and not lose confidence in themselves? They have to sustain the delusion at all costs or the cognitive discomfort is too great. Meanwhile, the tone of their writing--and this is subjective on my part--indicates to me their emotional conviction lags behind the bite of their words. Even if Trump was everything they say he was, they wouldn't be out their protesting against Trump. They're out their protesting against a feeling inside of themselves they've assigned to Trump and that they are unwilling to accept, that their actual humanity is at war with the fake-persona they've invented to make people like them more and that no longer makes people like them more. They are acting out their identity crisis in the streets.
I couldn't care less about theoretical rhetoric or abstract hypothetical framing on the question of whether Autocracy--be it Theocratic Integralist, Bonapartist, or Secular-Plutocrat-- is superior to Liberal Democracy as a form of government. I'm able to review the comparative history to supply the crucial facts on that score. Including exclusively focusing on European history, for those of you Romantics who disqualify any "Non-White" examples of monarchy as fatally flawed, because something something.
Liberal Democracy is superior to Monarchy. Prove me wrong. Using the grand archive of History, not Theory.
The point is none of these systems of governance are principled in and of themselves. A liberal democracy has the potential to be superior, but only if its adherents engage with people who disagree with them. It does require that we think the best of people.
I agree. Liberal Democracy is a form. Of Government. It doesn't ennoble people inherently. That isn't what Governments do. Government is entirely a materialist conception, considered as an institution.
So- what happens when the human beings it governs are conditioned- whether actively or inertially- to adhere to a philosophically materialist paradigm? What's the common ethos, if it's constructed exclusively on an individual basis?
imo that accounts for the pronouncements found in the founding documents, invoking God, divine providence, or what have you. The guys writing this are really trying to be their best selves in the moment of thinking and writing the Constitution, and in order to do that they're making reference to a realm beyond the material. That they apprehend and believe in, in whatever flawed individual way*, in the realm of a benevolent higher power. A divine morality and ethics, serving a common good.
And without that, Government is a cold, remote, desolate enterprise.
Yet the writers of the Constitution insist on a separation of Government and Religion. Yet they don't abolish Religion. They aren't disdaining the very idea of Religion. They're admitting something about the nature of Government Power. Its limitations.
They aren't getting rid of God by doing that. They're saying that an explicit official insistence on combining Religion with Government has a way of getting twisted into a manipulation of Religion by Government.
Even the best Governments are flawed instruments. I mean, consider the staffing. Consider who wrote the founding documents. Imperfect beings.
Governments can still act as worthy vessels, even if they aren't perfect. But they require maintenance. they get worn spots and cracks and splits, they need to be repaired. But a Theocracy insists that its actions and dictates are expressions of supreme law. Inherently. Which means that there's no need for any change. Theocratic Power assumes the power to say that there's no problem, it's perfect, because We are running this as servants of God's perfect will. His Will be done. The ultimate corruption.
That's the problem with Theocracy.
That said- what happens when Government leadership is in the hands of irreligious materialists, adhering to an exclusively materialist paradigm?
*there's always an element of human individual agency, intent, and assent involved in adherence to any religious or metaphysical paradigm. As a result, human individual conceptions of their own religious ideals are always incomplete, noisy, flawed. Nonetheless incomparably superior to the exclusively individualist human conceptualizations of materialist paradigms.
I agree with your concerns about theocracy, which inherently requires a population to submit to a worldview deemed perfect and therefore not in need of any further individual thought. But, the materialistic paradigm you referred to has the same potential danger, the notion there are answers that exist, and that flawed human beings are capable of understanding them sufficiently to account for every variable needed to solve the problem of how flawed human beings can best live together. Neither paradigm offers the ready-made solutions we would like to think they do. The highest compliment we can pay to our founders is that they were flawed and KNEW they were flawed. They created a system whereby a population could work together with the knowledge that not only do we not have all the answers, but that we never will. It is the 'republic' part of our democracy which gives voice to the minority at any given time in history who raise questions about the direction the majority seems to be intent on heading. The founders recognized that hubris, our tendency to delude ourselves into thinking we have everything all figured out, was the greatest danger. Not just to our own individual lives as we live them out, but also to the leaders we would choose since they would be reflections of us. They handed down this republic hoping and, yes praying, that we would have the humility to carry it on AS flawed individuals in a hopeless endeavor to find the answers together in a world that is forever changing. In other words, the moment we eliminate the last person willing to tell the rest of us we are all full of shit, we're doomed.
Numbers in these protests were very inflated. In SF the crowd at civic center looked about 2K as viewed in drone footage. Organizers reported 10 times that amount. See also NBC Boston coverage.
I've been in protests in SF against Iraq War with 1 million. For this area, a pathetic showing for No Kings and a bunch of BS born yesterday reporting
PS these heartfelt protesters in SF, BTW, also trained apparently to spell out "Yes on 50" -- that's Gavin N's favorite new gerrymandering proposition on the ballot
“While its origin is certainly feminine, and while the most manifest characteristic of the current regime is its support on the part of women, this is coupled with a pervasive drive to destroy everything feminine about those who uphold it. What was once driven by clearly feminine sensibilities is now a machine that destroys marriage, fertility, and even normal relations with men. There has never been a mechanism in history so thoroughly hateful toward female happiness, even as it owes its power to their disproportionate support. It’s not a matriarchy so much as a queerocracy, or rather, a teratocracy- rule by monsters.”
Wow! Alexis de Tocqueville, G.K. Chesterton, and P.J. O' Roarke. You certainly covered most of the bases. (I'd have included some of Mencken's acidic ruminations on democracy, and I think these crazed days cry out for Sam Kinison as well.) But that's a minor quibble. I always enjoy your writing, and it was good to see you let your hair down and unleash a bit on the Loony Left. As the President so aptly demonstrates at times, ridicule is a potent political tool. As Dennis Miller likes to say: "Comedy is tough. Wear a cup."
The style these tweets are written in sends a chill down my spine. I get flashbacks to 2017 when everyone talked like this and I felt like I was losing my mind.
The Librarian of Celeano is quite possibly the finest ironist since George Orwell and 1984. The Librarian unsheathes his rapier wit while conducting expert political analysis. Mirth turns to dread with his description of the totalitarian impulses in liberal democracy. Geriatric 'No King' marchers will no doubt take great offense - which, of course, is the point.
There's argument, pro and con, if this is Age of Aquarius but I suspect there's little honest disagreement if I note this is The Age of Mass Psychosis.
Those who govern, elected, inherited, Presidents, Ministers, Kings, Committees of the Holes, reflect, project such mass madness.
The way I see it, doesn't matter who's boss, our best bet is to give unto, and give in to Caesar, grudgingly, niggardly, as little, the absolute minimum we can get away with. Other than that follow Albert Camus' advice; "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
I've been thinking about that recently. The Age of Aquarius and women. There used to be an old first-year philosophy question: what would a world run by women look like?
We now know the answer.
Deranged and dystopian, pseudo-scientific emergency serving as an excuse for an impoverishing tyranny of flagellatory energy austerity.
These people are to be mocked, scorned, ridiculed, berated, and then ignored. They do not have a thought in their head about kings, they didn't pick that retarded slogan, they just repeated it because that's what retards do. Any discussion of kings, any at all, gives both it and them infinitely more credit than either deserve, by entertaining the legitimacy of thoughts they aren't even capable of having!
In their vernacular, democracy = what I want. Fascism = what I don't want. That's it, that's the whole equation! It is not more complicated. They have no deeper thoughts! You already know everything they think. They tell you every chance they get. No analysis required! They don't self censor on social media or anywhere else. They've never had to. They are an open book.
Ignore the baizuo, deport the illegal, and perhaps one day we'll have a country again, there is some percentage chance. Not a great percentage, but it's not zero either. One minor problem along the way to that, these folks are going to take over the the legal profession and the courts, and soon. Because that's who the law schools are producing today, thus there isn't any avoiding it. You will nostalgically pine for the reasoned jurisprudence of Wise Latina and Jumanji X. So we may have to ignore the courts too, eventually.
There has been an awakening, and it's interesting to observe its permutations.
I just spoke with an elderly relative (more elderly, even, than I,) and she expressed her concerns, all of which are legacy media hyperbole. What was interesting, is that she's not the type to shout anyone down or hang up on them, which makes conversation possible.
When I gently responded that money has been offered for those willing to undo their crime by self-deporting, and that anchor babies are not prevented from returning to the homeland with their parents, the response was illuminating.
She said that she doesn't trust the government now. Even more interesting, is that she said that she'd always trusted the government before. Mind you, Librarian, this is a woman of the sixties, although she wasn't a "proper" hippie.
After all of these years of close, loving association with this woman, the conversation left me somewhat nonplussed at the news of her having trusted government. Year after year, the corruption of government was discussed between us, and the role of campaign funding, corporatism and all the rest of it acknowledged and decried.
My point, is that there has never been any reason to trust government beyond what can be verified, and that there appears to have been a self-soothing mechanism of sorts involved with this apparently selective amnesia.
I do have to acknowledge the seductive duplicity of the propagandists. The faux-erudition and repetitive assertion reifies the efficacy of a "Grima whispering in Theoden's ear."
It's an inchoate contrarianism, to be sure. There's an innumerate element to it, and a strongly narcissistic foundation. I wouldn't say that my interlocutor today is narcissistic, only that she was never convinced that national and world events merited the time to look beneath the surface; security and relative prosperity will have that effect.
The youngsters can go ahead and make derisive observations about the geriatrics "hitting the streets" with their walkers and canes, but I resent the mockingbird media's ruining the final years of a plurality of basically nice old folks, with their propagandistic induction of stress and anxiety. The old folks do not have the tools to cope with it.
Regarding feminization and the selective observance of law; yes, it's obvious and has been for quite some time. There is a childish aspect of the enraged refusal to acknowledge the distinction between cognition and emotive expression. Your points about how this manifests, are solid. For myself, I have been reflecting on something for well over fifty years; that "listen to your mother" meant "obey your mother." That manner of prostituting the language has never been something I considered acceptable (yes, I was one of *those* types of youngsters.)
I suppose it's unreasonable to have expected otherwise, sixty-plus years ago, because few had the prescience to understand where such imprecision of speech would lead. Nevertheless, men bear some responsibility for allowing the progressive devolution of communication into the relativistic morass within which we now find ourselves enmired.
It's also worth reminding folks not to discount female psychopathy. I'm referring to the common game of "let's you and him fight," that tiresome mating fitness test. Berne was gender-agnostic in his description of that psychosexual gamesmanship, but consider the era he lived in; egalitarianism was hierarchically placed above accurate attribution. Still is, amongst the cohort that has the most to gain from such distortion.
To sum up, it's not obvious what was the dream state and to what the geriatrics awakened. The threat levels are real, but the perceptions of what constitutes them are wholly dependent on recently-inculcated priors.
There's a BIG difference between a distant king over a large territory and a local king that you can grovel to or assassinate if you aren't happy with what he's doing. (This principle applies to Nordic socialized medicine. It is administered locally, not bureaucratically.)
Paul’s point in the scripture I noted is that kings are agents of God as such, regardless of their personal characteristics. They serve His purposes in ways we can’t always see. And Hellenistic rulers, while they could be brutal, still lacked the administrative and technological means to inflict their will as thoroughly as our longhoused managerial officialdom.
Slavery served as a pretty darned good proxy for managerialism.
Another example: Japan. Japan used market forces to impose a secret police system that would have been Stalin's wet dream. If any peasant got out of line, an entire village could be wiped out. Outsourced tyranny.
The result is very clean streets, but they have to speak English in the cockpit so the copilot can directly tell the captain he is about to fly into a mountain. And they have to get dangerously drunk to tell the truth to each other, and sometimes they will hire a barbarian (an American) to say things they cannot politely say.
Unfortunately, any modern king WOULD have the means for managerial officialdom. A king with a modern state is, perhaps, just a dictator. We can't RETVRN without also giving up modernism, but what would-be king would do that?
I’m not sure how diffusing the same power among hundreds of thousands of anonymous and unaccountable managers is an improvement over one visible man having it.
A trivial detail: the citation of Chesterton is incorrect. That is from Chesterton's "What I Saw in America" (1922), chapter 'Fads and Public Opinion’.
Alexis de Tocqueville: "An innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives."
Progressives are projectors. They are often enough the authoritarian-thinkers. It's all they see when they look out but they don't realize they're forcing an internal pattern recognition onto the world and not the world forcing it onto them, sort of like a cheating spouse becoming suspicious their partner is cheating on them. It can approach levels resembling paranoia. I don't know if it's too much time online or what, but this critical error in projection that they cannot stop making, creates a momentum of bad analysis that appears on its surface to be logical, since it follows the pattern they've projected onto it, but is totally illogical and does not withstand scrutiny. But how could they step back and acknowledge the projection now and not lose confidence in themselves? They have to sustain the delusion at all costs or the cognitive discomfort is too great. Meanwhile, the tone of their writing--and this is subjective on my part--indicates to me their emotional conviction lags behind the bite of their words. Even if Trump was everything they say he was, they wouldn't be out their protesting against Trump. They're out their protesting against a feeling inside of themselves they've assigned to Trump and that they are unwilling to accept, that their actual humanity is at war with the fake-persona they've invented to make people like them more and that no longer makes people like them more. They are acting out their identity crisis in the streets.
Leftists project. They always, only, ever project.
Or maybe it's the start of a left wing Tea Party movement...
I couldn't care less about theoretical rhetoric or abstract hypothetical framing on the question of whether Autocracy--be it Theocratic Integralist, Bonapartist, or Secular-Plutocrat-- is superior to Liberal Democracy as a form of government. I'm able to review the comparative history to supply the crucial facts on that score. Including exclusively focusing on European history, for those of you Romantics who disqualify any "Non-White" examples of monarchy as fatally flawed, because something something.
Liberal Democracy is superior to Monarchy. Prove me wrong. Using the grand archive of History, not Theory.
The point is none of these systems of governance are principled in and of themselves. A liberal democracy has the potential to be superior, but only if its adherents engage with people who disagree with them. It does require that we think the best of people.
I agree. Liberal Democracy is a form. Of Government. It doesn't ennoble people inherently. That isn't what Governments do. Government is entirely a materialist conception, considered as an institution.
So- what happens when the human beings it governs are conditioned- whether actively or inertially- to adhere to a philosophically materialist paradigm? What's the common ethos, if it's constructed exclusively on an individual basis?
imo that accounts for the pronouncements found in the founding documents, invoking God, divine providence, or what have you. The guys writing this are really trying to be their best selves in the moment of thinking and writing the Constitution, and in order to do that they're making reference to a realm beyond the material. That they apprehend and believe in, in whatever flawed individual way*, in the realm of a benevolent higher power. A divine morality and ethics, serving a common good.
And without that, Government is a cold, remote, desolate enterprise.
Yet the writers of the Constitution insist on a separation of Government and Religion. Yet they don't abolish Religion. They aren't disdaining the very idea of Religion. They're admitting something about the nature of Government Power. Its limitations.
They aren't getting rid of God by doing that. They're saying that an explicit official insistence on combining Religion with Government has a way of getting twisted into a manipulation of Religion by Government.
Even the best Governments are flawed instruments. I mean, consider the staffing. Consider who wrote the founding documents. Imperfect beings.
Governments can still act as worthy vessels, even if they aren't perfect. But they require maintenance. they get worn spots and cracks and splits, they need to be repaired. But a Theocracy insists that its actions and dictates are expressions of supreme law. Inherently. Which means that there's no need for any change. Theocratic Power assumes the power to say that there's no problem, it's perfect, because We are running this as servants of God's perfect will. His Will be done. The ultimate corruption.
That's the problem with Theocracy.
That said- what happens when Government leadership is in the hands of irreligious materialists, adhering to an exclusively materialist paradigm?
*there's always an element of human individual agency, intent, and assent involved in adherence to any religious or metaphysical paradigm. As a result, human individual conceptions of their own religious ideals are always incomplete, noisy, flawed. Nonetheless incomparably superior to the exclusively individualist human conceptualizations of materialist paradigms.
I agree with your concerns about theocracy, which inherently requires a population to submit to a worldview deemed perfect and therefore not in need of any further individual thought. But, the materialistic paradigm you referred to has the same potential danger, the notion there are answers that exist, and that flawed human beings are capable of understanding them sufficiently to account for every variable needed to solve the problem of how flawed human beings can best live together. Neither paradigm offers the ready-made solutions we would like to think they do. The highest compliment we can pay to our founders is that they were flawed and KNEW they were flawed. They created a system whereby a population could work together with the knowledge that not only do we not have all the answers, but that we never will. It is the 'republic' part of our democracy which gives voice to the minority at any given time in history who raise questions about the direction the majority seems to be intent on heading. The founders recognized that hubris, our tendency to delude ourselves into thinking we have everything all figured out, was the greatest danger. Not just to our own individual lives as we live them out, but also to the leaders we would choose since they would be reflections of us. They handed down this republic hoping and, yes praying, that we would have the humility to carry it on AS flawed individuals in a hopeless endeavor to find the answers together in a world that is forever changing. In other words, the moment we eliminate the last person willing to tell the rest of us we are all full of shit, we're doomed.
Hey all I responded in the restack instead of here. Visit there is you’re interested.
Numbers in these protests were very inflated. In SF the crowd at civic center looked about 2K as viewed in drone footage. Organizers reported 10 times that amount. See also NBC Boston coverage.
I've been in protests in SF against Iraq War with 1 million. For this area, a pathetic showing for No Kings and a bunch of BS born yesterday reporting
PS these heartfelt protesters in SF, BTW, also trained apparently to spell out "Yes on 50" -- that's Gavin N's favorite new gerrymandering proposition on the ballot
Exactly what CA needs: more democrats.
That Chesterton quote is nuclear. I hesitate to use some of it in X posts because I value my life.
Nuclear and prophetic.
We are now experiencing the Mad Mother:
“While its origin is certainly feminine, and while the most manifest characteristic of the current regime is its support on the part of women, this is coupled with a pervasive drive to destroy everything feminine about those who uphold it. What was once driven by clearly feminine sensibilities is now a machine that destroys marriage, fertility, and even normal relations with men. There has never been a mechanism in history so thoroughly hateful toward female happiness, even as it owes its power to their disproportionate support. It’s not a matriarchy so much as a queerocracy, or rather, a teratocracy- rule by monsters.”
and they did abandon their own nurseries in favor of meddling in other's.
It’s the shot across the bow that we ignore at our peril.
Wow! Alexis de Tocqueville, G.K. Chesterton, and P.J. O' Roarke. You certainly covered most of the bases. (I'd have included some of Mencken's acidic ruminations on democracy, and I think these crazed days cry out for Sam Kinison as well.) But that's a minor quibble. I always enjoy your writing, and it was good to see you let your hair down and unleash a bit on the Loony Left. As the President so aptly demonstrates at times, ridicule is a potent political tool. As Dennis Miller likes to say: "Comedy is tough. Wear a cup."
The style these tweets are written in sends a chill down my spine. I get flashbacks to 2017 when everyone talked like this and I felt like I was losing my mind.
The Librarian of Celeano is quite possibly the finest ironist since George Orwell and 1984. The Librarian unsheathes his rapier wit while conducting expert political analysis. Mirth turns to dread with his description of the totalitarian impulses in liberal democracy. Geriatric 'No King' marchers will no doubt take great offense - which, of course, is the point.
There's argument, pro and con, if this is Age of Aquarius but I suspect there's little honest disagreement if I note this is The Age of Mass Psychosis.
Those who govern, elected, inherited, Presidents, Ministers, Kings, Committees of the Holes, reflect, project such mass madness.
The way I see it, doesn't matter who's boss, our best bet is to give unto, and give in to Caesar, grudgingly, niggardly, as little, the absolute minimum we can get away with. Other than that follow Albert Camus' advice; "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
I've been thinking about that recently. The Age of Aquarius and women. There used to be an old first-year philosophy question: what would a world run by women look like?
We now know the answer.
Deranged and dystopian, pseudo-scientific emergency serving as an excuse for an impoverishing tyranny of flagellatory energy austerity.
The full Chesterton quote, which I had not seen before, is chilling in its accuracy and specificity.
These people are to be mocked, scorned, ridiculed, berated, and then ignored. They do not have a thought in their head about kings, they didn't pick that retarded slogan, they just repeated it because that's what retards do. Any discussion of kings, any at all, gives both it and them infinitely more credit than either deserve, by entertaining the legitimacy of thoughts they aren't even capable of having!
In their vernacular, democracy = what I want. Fascism = what I don't want. That's it, that's the whole equation! It is not more complicated. They have no deeper thoughts! You already know everything they think. They tell you every chance they get. No analysis required! They don't self censor on social media or anywhere else. They've never had to. They are an open book.
Ignore the baizuo, deport the illegal, and perhaps one day we'll have a country again, there is some percentage chance. Not a great percentage, but it's not zero either. One minor problem along the way to that, these folks are going to take over the the legal profession and the courts, and soon. Because that's who the law schools are producing today, thus there isn't any avoiding it. You will nostalgically pine for the reasoned jurisprudence of Wise Latina and Jumanji X. So we may have to ignore the courts too, eventually.
All Episcopalians are lesbians.
There has been an awakening, and it's interesting to observe its permutations.
I just spoke with an elderly relative (more elderly, even, than I,) and she expressed her concerns, all of which are legacy media hyperbole. What was interesting, is that she's not the type to shout anyone down or hang up on them, which makes conversation possible.
When I gently responded that money has been offered for those willing to undo their crime by self-deporting, and that anchor babies are not prevented from returning to the homeland with their parents, the response was illuminating.
She said that she doesn't trust the government now. Even more interesting, is that she said that she'd always trusted the government before. Mind you, Librarian, this is a woman of the sixties, although she wasn't a "proper" hippie.
After all of these years of close, loving association with this woman, the conversation left me somewhat nonplussed at the news of her having trusted government. Year after year, the corruption of government was discussed between us, and the role of campaign funding, corporatism and all the rest of it acknowledged and decried.
My point, is that there has never been any reason to trust government beyond what can be verified, and that there appears to have been a self-soothing mechanism of sorts involved with this apparently selective amnesia.
I do have to acknowledge the seductive duplicity of the propagandists. The faux-erudition and repetitive assertion reifies the efficacy of a "Grima whispering in Theoden's ear."
It's an inchoate contrarianism, to be sure. There's an innumerate element to it, and a strongly narcissistic foundation. I wouldn't say that my interlocutor today is narcissistic, only that she was never convinced that national and world events merited the time to look beneath the surface; security and relative prosperity will have that effect.
The youngsters can go ahead and make derisive observations about the geriatrics "hitting the streets" with their walkers and canes, but I resent the mockingbird media's ruining the final years of a plurality of basically nice old folks, with their propagandistic induction of stress and anxiety. The old folks do not have the tools to cope with it.
Regarding feminization and the selective observance of law; yes, it's obvious and has been for quite some time. There is a childish aspect of the enraged refusal to acknowledge the distinction between cognition and emotive expression. Your points about how this manifests, are solid. For myself, I have been reflecting on something for well over fifty years; that "listen to your mother" meant "obey your mother." That manner of prostituting the language has never been something I considered acceptable (yes, I was one of *those* types of youngsters.)
I suppose it's unreasonable to have expected otherwise, sixty-plus years ago, because few had the prescience to understand where such imprecision of speech would lead. Nevertheless, men bear some responsibility for allowing the progressive devolution of communication into the relativistic morass within which we now find ourselves enmired.
It's also worth reminding folks not to discount female psychopathy. I'm referring to the common game of "let's you and him fight," that tiresome mating fitness test. Berne was gender-agnostic in his description of that psychosexual gamesmanship, but consider the era he lived in; egalitarianism was hierarchically placed above accurate attribution. Still is, amongst the cohort that has the most to gain from such distortion.
To sum up, it's not obvious what was the dream state and to what the geriatrics awakened. The threat levels are real, but the perceptions of what constitutes them are wholly dependent on recently-inculcated priors.
I was one of *those* kids too.
Still am, I reckon
I want a republic. But I would probably support a Monarch who would smash the technocracy and leftism generally.
And for those who think kings are agents of God, here's a tour of what the kings were like during the Hellenistic Era. https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/guest-review-alexander-to-actium?publication_id=1271258&post_id=174445334&isFreemail=true&r=17oqhk&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
There's a BIG difference between a distant king over a large territory and a local king that you can grovel to or assassinate if you aren't happy with what he's doing. (This principle applies to Nordic socialized medicine. It is administered locally, not bureaucratically.)
Paul’s point in the scripture I noted is that kings are agents of God as such, regardless of their personal characteristics. They serve His purposes in ways we can’t always see. And Hellenistic rulers, while they could be brutal, still lacked the administrative and technological means to inflict their will as thoroughly as our longhoused managerial officialdom.
Slavery served as a pretty darned good proxy for managerialism.
Another example: Japan. Japan used market forces to impose a secret police system that would have been Stalin's wet dream. If any peasant got out of line, an entire village could be wiped out. Outsourced tyranny.
The result is very clean streets, but they have to speak English in the cockpit so the copilot can directly tell the captain he is about to fly into a mountain. And they have to get dangerously drunk to tell the truth to each other, and sometimes they will hire a barbarian (an American) to say things they cannot politely say.
Unfortunately, any modern king WOULD have the means for managerial officialdom. A king with a modern state is, perhaps, just a dictator. We can't RETVRN without also giving up modernism, but what would-be king would do that?
I’m not sure how diffusing the same power among hundreds of thousands of anonymous and unaccountable managers is an improvement over one visible man having it.
No, I agree it's not. But the combination of both would be worse.
Great, awesome reasoning.
A trivial detail: the citation of Chesterton is incorrect. That is from Chesterton's "What I Saw in America" (1922), chapter 'Fads and Public Opinion’.
https://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/what-i-saw-in-america/10/
The link I have cites “What’s Wrong with The World.” Perhaps the essay appeared in both collections.
I searched “What’s Wrong” for keywords, and could not find it.
Describe the U.S. in 25 words or less.
Alexis de Tocqueville: "An innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives."
He nailed it 185 years ago.
We’ve been discussing at work how a Godly monarch is a way better system than a democracy.