Tag Archives: Democracy

Chronic Kinglessness

A while back, someone linked me to this interview with Tory MP Rory Stuart from 2014 (H/T: Peregrin). It was rather informative on what is wrong with modern politics (read it all).

“But in our situation we’re all powerless. I mean, we pretend we’re run by people. We’re not run by anybody. The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere.” Some commentators, he says, think we’re run by an oligarchy. “But we’re not. I mean, nobody can see power in Britain. The politicians think journalists have power. The journalists know they don’t have any. Then they think the bankers have power. The bankers know they don’t have any. None of them have any power.”

And this from a man who only two years ago attended the Bilderberg conference, a highly exclusive and secretive gathering of the world’s most powerful bankers, politicians and businesspeople?

“Well there we are, you see,” he smiles. “I can tell you, there is nothing there. It’s like the wizard of Oz. This is the age of the wizard of Oz, you know. In the end you get behind the curtain and you finally meet the wizard and there’s this tiny, frightened figure. I think every prime minister has sort of said this since Blair. You get there and you pull the lever, and nothing happens.”

This is a perfect example of what Moldbug, referencing Carlyle, referred to as chronic kinglessness.

This is the secret of politics and modern society: nobody is in charge, no one has power, and nobody is running the show: not the people, not the corporations, not the politicians, not the bureaucrats, not the courts, not the military, not the journalists, not the bankers, not the white male patriarchs, not the SJW’s, not the Jews, not Davos, not the Bilderbergs, not the Tri-lateral Commission, not the Illuminati, and not the lizard-people.

Everybody likes to posit that some bogeyman composed of people they dislike is in charge and running, ruining, things behind the scenes because that is comforting. Even if a conspiracy is leading to disaster, at least we’re being led. Even if they are evil incarnate, at least they know what they’re doing and are leading society in a specific direction. It is comforting to know someone is in charge, even if we hate them.

But we’re not that lucky. There is no one who really knows what they’re doing and no one is in charge. Everybody has just a little bit of power, some have more some less, to accomplish tiny things, so nobody has any real power to accomplish anything. Our system is vieled anarchy.

Society’s moving the way it is not because anyone is willing it, but because society’s movement has taken on an inertia of its own, and continues moving along this inertial path whatever actual people may desire. It has almost become a will of its own, some have taken to calling it an egregore, but it’s not really mystical or mysterious. It moves because that’s the way it has moved, so people follow it along and continue to move it, so it moves.

We have the rule of law, but the law is unknown and unconstrained by man.

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Don’t believe me, remember this picture:

The wife of the leader of the free world was so powerless, she had to make meaningless twitter activism to try to rescue for a few hundred kidnapped girls. The so-called Leader of the Free World, who ostensibly has the most powerful military in the history of the world under his command, couldn’t liberate a few hundred girls from a few hundred tribal savages, so she had to pray to the activism gods.

The king of any third-rate kingdom in history would laugh at the pitiable weakness of any other king who couldn’t even round up 100 aging men to rescue some maidens to make his queen smile. Yet, the Commander in Chief of the the million man army of the strongest empire in history failed to do this.

The girls were later saved by a hundred aging South African mercenaries. I’ll also note, that despite being able to do what the US President was powerless to, these mercenaries also expressed feelings of powerlessness.

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Because everybody has some power, but nobody has real power, there is no responsibility. Back to the interview:

Whenever Stewart took one of these ideas, such as rule of law, to an actual Afghan village, it became meaningless. “None of the things that I’m looking for exist. There obviously isn’t police, or a judge, there isn’t a legal code, there isn’t a prison. There’s a bunch of guys with white beards sitting around, and their system of doing that might be quite different from the next-door village. So then how do you get from there to here? Well, it can be done, but it’s not going to be done by a foreigner who barely understands any of that.”

These bearded men have real power. It may be limited to a small village, but it is real in a way no modern in the West could understand. There is no legal power or police backing them up, but they still have control over their local village. Because they have real power, they also have real responsibility; even an outsider who knows nothing can tell exactly who’s in charge. The village knows exactly who to hold accountable if something goes wrong, and if leadership is bad enough, they know exactly who to shoot.

On the other hand, let’s examine our governance using Obamacare as an example. Obamacare was nightmare of inefficincies, failed deadlines, and rising health insurance prices. Despite being named after Obama, the blame gets heaped everywhere: Obama who championed the bill, Republicans who obstructed it and watered it down, the lobbyists and interns who actually wrote the bill, Justice Roberts who ruled a not-tax was a tax, the IT company that screwed the website, the bureaucracy implementing the plan, the insurance companies who didn’t act the way leftists wanted, or the people who elected those who put the whole thing into place.

Nobody got what they wanted out of this debacle, and everybody’s unhappy. Everybody was acting like they were powerless to get what they wanted and their opponents were using their overwhelming power to get their way. The only person who had even a hint of real power in this whole thing was Roberts who technically could have squashed it, but who felt he didn’t have the power to, so instead he made the cockamamie excuse that something that was specifically written as not being a tax was a tax.

Everybody has some power, but nobody has real power, so nobody nobody knows who to blame, beyond the other guy, and nobody can be held accountable, when things go wrong.

The reverse holds true as well, no responsibility means no authority. If no one is responsible for something, no one has legitimate authority over it, no one has power over it. Every villager in this village, knows who has authority. Nobody in the US has any clue who actually has authority.

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Power flows from authority, authority flows from legitimacy.

At its essence, power is violence, real or implied. It is the ability to force others to do your will.

But, the violent capacities of one man are extremely limited, no one man could stop ten, let alone a hundred thousand, so the capacity for violence, real or implied, comes not from personal capacities, but from the ability to command others to carry out violence on your behalf. A man’s power is essentially: if he ordered it, how many man would commit violence on his behalf. The ability to carry out your will, particularly through the use of others, is authority. Authority is from here power flows.

Legitimacy is whether men accept your authority. Do men believe you have the right to command them and do they believe they have a duty to obey when you command? You can temporarily force people to obey without legitimacy through fear, but this illusionary authority lasts only until someone openly disobeys without consequence or someone responds with greater force.

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So, who today has power?

The President can, with enough political maneveuring, command thousands of men into war, but that is limited. He couldn’t even command 100 men to #bringbackourgirls to please his wife. Should the President command a war, Justice Roberts could force the war to end, if he declared it unconstiutional. Theoretically, the Constitution states that Congress decides when men are sent to war, they could theoretically overrule the President, but they seem to not have been particularly effective in stopping the President in recent history. A general could theoretically disobey the president; he controls the men with guns. Come to that, the men with guns themselves could do whatever they desired, who could stop them?

So, in theory, nobody really controls when men are sent to war, yet, the men still march to war, and the wars end up wasteful and counter-productive. This century, our enemies always seem to end up controlling the countries the US invades, yet no one is ever held responsible.

You will notice the Constitution mentioned repeatedly above. Odd that a document, a set of words that could be destroyed by a single 10-cent match, controls so much. The Constitution has power because the constitution confers legitimacy. The legitimacy confers authority.

Yet, the legitimacy of the Constitution has been waning. When will the living document lose its power?

This basis of legitimacy is dedicated to preventing any one man from obtaining any real power. This was more or less functional when government was small and controlled, power rested outside the government, so there was little power for the Constitution to to distribute. It may have been uncontrolled, but it was a toddler swinging wildly. But as government has grown, so to has the dysfunctionality. More power rests with the government, but nobody has any real power over that power. The power of government swings around madly, like an enraged and blinded Hercules.

Also, odd, isn’t it, that the Constitution fails utterly to check the growth of government power, yet it strongly checks the power of any single man.

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We are suffering chronic kinglessness. Everybody has some power, but nobody has real power. All the men we think are powerful, think themselves powerless. Instead of a directed, functional state, we a hyper-powerful super-state throwing its tremendous weight around blindly, destroying everything in its path. The Constitution, which limits any man from having real power, prevents any man from exercising real authority, yet at the same time it is helpless to limit government, so the behemoth fumbles around blindly leaving a swath of destruction in its wake.

CS Lewis was a Prophet

Well, not literally, but read this from Screwtape Proposes a Toast:

Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.

The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.

The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don’t mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.

And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here’s a fellow who says he doesn’t like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here’s a man who hasn’t turned on the jukebox — he’s one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.”Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it — make it respectable and even laudable — by the incantatory use of the word democratic.

Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from fear of being undemocratic. I am credibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their Being Like Folks; that people who would really wish to be — and are offered the Grace which would enable them to be — honest, chaste, or temperate refuse it. To accept might make them Different, might offend against the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals.

All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: “O God, make me a normal twentieth century girl!” Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly: “Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.”

Meanwhile, as a delightful by-product, the few (fewer every day) who will not be made Normal or Regular and Like Folks and Integrated increasingly become in reality the prigs and cranks which the rabble would in any case have believed them to be. For suspicion often creates what it expects. (“Since, whatever I do, the neighbors are going to think me a witch, or a Communist agent, I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and become one in reality.”) As a result we now have an intelligentsia which, though very small, is very useful to the cause of Hell.

But that is a mere by-product. What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.

He knew the way it was going decades before it went there.