The Question of Whether The Deep State is Clever or Stupid

There is a natural instinct in all of us, I propose, that assumes that people in authority know what they are doing. More or less.

Thus, we tend to think that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must have a card up her sleeve when she omits to send the impeachment of President Trump over to the Senate. But suppose she doesn't? Suppose she is just playing the next card in her hand because she doesn't know what else to do? Maybe she knows that a) to send the impeachment to the Senate as is would end up as a disaster for Democrats, so that b) playing manipulative games at least puts off the inevitable.

My 70-year-old yoga teacher usually manages to blurt out some New York Times conventional wisdom about Trump at the beginning of the class. This week it was that Trump would easily win in 2020 on the economy: if only he wasn't so crazy.

Earth to liberal bubble: it was Trump's attack on the liberal Gentry that made him president! Millions of Commoners that had given up suddenly discovered a politician that seemed to "care about people like them." Whoa! Who'da thunk it?

Or the Deep State intelligence community chappies that let themselves be suckered into spying on a presidential campaign. Are we to think they are cunning Svengalis? Or just easily duped Barnacles and Stiltstockings hoping for preferment from the next admininstration?

Or the geniuses that gave us the Great Recession. Science says that the credit system needs two things: properly collateralized loans, and borrowers that can service their loans. So how come our governing geniuses gave us 100% mortgages and liar loans? Are they dumb or somep'n?

Whatabout the brilliant Democratic Socialists that want to bring everything under the aegis of the admininstrative state after a century of proving that it doesn't work? And 100 million dead slaves under Communism? Are they evil or just stupid?

The truth is that they are just humans and, as usual Nietzsche explains the whole procedure -- The Will to Power §517. Our lords and masters are just average Joes walking in the world assuming that the conventional wisdom and things-as-they-are explain the world.

The fictitious world of a subject, substance, "reason,"etc., is needed--: there is in us a power to order, simplify, falsify, artificially distinguish. "Truth" is the will to be master over the multiplicity of sensations:-- to classify phenomena into definite categories. In this we start from a belief in the "in-itself" of things (we take phenomena as real).

Of course, it's been a long road for me to accept the Nietzschean view. That, as animals in the world, we have to discriminate among all the welter of information coming in through our five senses that deluges us every moment, and filter out the things that might kill us! So we -- so much higher than the ordinary animals! -- conjure up narratives about the world to try and understand it: gods arranging battles from Mt. Olympus; spirits in trees; reason and logic; matter; energy; Four Elements; atoms and molecules; quarks; dark matter and energy.

And I wonder what comes next!

Truly, human understanding has gone through an astonishing transformation since, well let's say since Descartes and "I think, therefore I am."

The truth is that all of our knowledge is conditional and a likely story. Good until it fails to explain the world. And we have to edit out 97.2 percent of the possibilities in order to stay sane. So everybody lives in their comfortable bubbles paying attention only to the edited information that tells them comfortable things that confirm their world view.

But, of course, what is comfortable to you in your bubble may be a perfect hell for me in my bubble.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

And I suspect that James Delingpole is right with his analysis that "The 2010s were the Twilight of the Elites." Would that be Führungsschichterdämmerung, James? Or something shorter?

Happy New Year!