Like Starving Rats to the Cheese
Trump's tormentors were predicted by both F.A. Hayek and George Orwell.
Ruminating this afternoon about the motivation of the cadre of people on the left who are relentlessly attacking Trump, I thought about F.A. Hayek and his postulate about how apparatchiks fight their way to the top in an authoritarian society.
Of course, these minions are acting on the orders of their party bosses, but there is more to it than that, and I remembered that way back in 1944, how Professor Hayek explained them all - E. Jean Carroll, Judge Lewis Kaplan, Tish James, Judge Arthur Engoron, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, Tanya Chutkan, and Jack Smith, when he wrote:
"Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do immoral things. The principle that the end justifies the means, which in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals, in collectivist ethics becomes necessarily the supreme rule."
Sort of puts a capstone on the tragedies of the last few years, doesn’t it?
In a normal world, one where people still possess their wits and values, none of this would be possible because people simply would not stand for it. The social mores would be so strong that the patent and contrived unfairness would be roundly rejected, and peer pressure would stop it before it was considered.
But it is happening.
It seems every time you think they have bottomed out; we learn there is no bottom. The limit of depravity is undefined.
Hayek explained that, too:
“To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, therefore, a man must be prepared to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. In the totalitarian machine there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous.”
As Hayek wrote, it is happening largely because these despicable people are climbing over each other to see who is the most despicable, and when society doesn’t object to it, the society itself ratchets itself down another notch on the scale of despicability.
A couple of years ago, I found an excerpt from George Orwell’s critique of James Burnham’s 1941 “The Managerial Revolution” that fits well here. In it, Orwell wrote:
“Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of ‘managers.’”
Orwell was describing a planned, authoritarian, communistic society, essentially creating a superior class controlled by dictators at the top. It is a place where rule over the masses is based upon the edicts of experts handed down to a managerial class of minions and if the minions please their masters, they are awarded with status, influence, power, money, and position within this bent society.
Trumps attackers are like starving rats climbing over each other to get to the tremendous, fantastic, perfectly beautiful cheese.
I read Eisenhower's farewell address every year although you can watch it on social media as well. One of the aspects of the speech is how he analyzed the US and the world from his lens as military strategist and President. The speech is famous for his reference to the "military/industrial complex" but he also spent a lot of time talking about the upcoming threat of technology, supported and developed by the massive spending and standing armies of unprecedented proportions. The recent revelations of the collusion of big tech with big government to determine the outcome of the last election by real journalists like Taibbi and Carlson are buried by the same media that was also complicit.
Carlson's interview with Mike Benz about the national security state and the new world order is something everyone should watch.
Hitting the nail on the head. But CRT, DEI and wokist conformism provides multiple opportunities for ruthless social climbers to cancel and dispossess more capable and more decent citizens from jobs and reputations.