The Zman has a couple of posts over two days mourning the censorship and the police-state tactics of our present rulers and their willing accomplices in Social Media and the Deep State bureaucracy.
It is, of course, monstrous.
But I regard this as a good sign rather than a bad sign. This is because of my belief in the theory of Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. Quite simply, he argues that any revolution ends up in some kind of a Reign of Terror. And that is because any ideological revolution ends up failing to live up to its promises. This is because there cannot be an end to human suffering. There is no magic, or religious, or ideological agenda that can change the facts of life, that it is a vale of tears.
So, any religious or ideological revolution that promises heaven on Earth eventually ends up with censorship of inconvenient ideas, and the canceling of inconvenient people.
But, Brinton points out in Anatomy, the Reign of Terror cannot last. Humans cannot abide living in an ideological frenzy. They soon want to go back to life as normal.
Maybe that is because the human suffering in a Reign of Terror, whether French, or Bolshevik, or Maoist, is a lot worse that normal everyday human suffering.
So I regard the social media censorship as an admission by our ruling-class lords and ladies that their regime isn't working.
After all, if the glories of progressive politics were working, and all the good little boys and girls were happy campers why would any social media company need to truckle to the local lefty thugs and remove objectionable content? Who needs to worry about a few marginal losers?
If the glories of progressive politics were working, who would need to cancel minor league dissidents? They are marginal, idiots. Who would fear them and their antediluvian ideas? Let them collapse under their own weight!
But there is another factor here. And that is that our current ruling class is not a revolutionary cadre but an ancien régime, staffed with fools, knaves, and incompetents.
After all, how in the world could the Best and the Brightest possibly lose to Trump? How could they possibly bungle the FBI effort to compromise Candidate Trump? How could they have bungled the Mueller investigation so that it came up with bupkis? Or the impeachment? Or, as is now coming out, the defenestration of LTG Michael Flynn?
Do you understand what a staggering record of blunder and failure it has been?
I know. Thank goodness. Imagine if those guys could actually shoot straight.
What I notice is that our rulers really have no clue, and this is normal. The people that do have a clue are the revolutionaries that set up the regime. They knew what they were doing because they learned from their mistakes in the revolutionary process. That's why they won! They learned fast.
But the folks that inherit the regime from the Founders don't really know what they are doing. They are just picking up the script, trying to carry on the tradition without really knowing how or why it works.
For instance, the current ruling-class script is based on the idea that, a century ago, a small coterie of rich kids could organize the working class, a majority of the nation, to vote for them in return for loot and plunder and thereby seize state power. The middle class at the time was a minority of the voters.
But then the working class slowly became middle class. So the coalition between the rich kids and the workers started to face problems, because there were less workers and more middle-class commoners.
Now, the ruling class has compensated somewhat by enrolling an enlarged educated class into the ruling class as a kind of educated gentry. The educated get loot and plunder too. And the rulers have imported millions of immigrants that start out, as they always have, as ethnic minorities huddled in ethnic ghettos in the bigger cities.
And the rulers have got gentry women and gays imagining they are helpless victims!
But I think the rise of the Squad -- non-white women congerscritters -- and the various diverse Democratic presidential candidates show that the replacement for the white male ruling class is not yet "fit for purpose" as the Brits say. They all know how to act as they have been carefully taught in the progressive schools and universities. But they really haven't come up through a school of hard knocks as real revolutionaries do.
So I expect the near future to feature more efforts to censor and cancel annoying voices and messages, and I expect the rulers and their supporters to continue to fumble around. Because that is what you expect in a failing ancien régime.
But I think that the days of the current progressive ruling class are numbered.
I just hope they don't do anything stupid as they realize, more and more, that power is slipping out of their hands.
Wait. Of course they will do stupid stuff. That's what ancien régimes do. I just hope they don't do stupid stuff that gets people hurt.
So, any religious or ideological revolution that promises heaven on Earth eventually ends up with censorship of inconvenient ideas, and the canceling of inconvenient people.
But, Brinton points out in Anatomy, the Reign of Terror cannot last. Humans cannot abide living in an ideological frenzy. They soon want to go back to life as normal.
Maybe that is because the human suffering in a Reign of Terror, whether French, or Bolshevik, or Maoist, is a lot worse that normal everyday human suffering.
So I regard the social media censorship as an admission by our ruling-class lords and ladies that their regime isn't working.
After all, if the glories of progressive politics were working, and all the good little boys and girls were happy campers why would any social media company need to truckle to the local lefty thugs and remove objectionable content? Who needs to worry about a few marginal losers?
If the glories of progressive politics were working, who would need to cancel minor league dissidents? They are marginal, idiots. Who would fear them and their antediluvian ideas? Let them collapse under their own weight!
But there is another factor here. And that is that our current ruling class is not a revolutionary cadre but an ancien régime, staffed with fools, knaves, and incompetents.
After all, how in the world could the Best and the Brightest possibly lose to Trump? How could they possibly bungle the FBI effort to compromise Candidate Trump? How could they have bungled the Mueller investigation so that it came up with bupkis? Or the impeachment? Or, as is now coming out, the defenestration of LTG Michael Flynn?
Do you understand what a staggering record of blunder and failure it has been?
I know. Thank goodness. Imagine if those guys could actually shoot straight.
What I notice is that our rulers really have no clue, and this is normal. The people that do have a clue are the revolutionaries that set up the regime. They knew what they were doing because they learned from their mistakes in the revolutionary process. That's why they won! They learned fast.
But the folks that inherit the regime from the Founders don't really know what they are doing. They are just picking up the script, trying to carry on the tradition without really knowing how or why it works.
For instance, the current ruling-class script is based on the idea that, a century ago, a small coterie of rich kids could organize the working class, a majority of the nation, to vote for them in return for loot and plunder and thereby seize state power. The middle class at the time was a minority of the voters.
But then the working class slowly became middle class. So the coalition between the rich kids and the workers started to face problems, because there were less workers and more middle-class commoners.
Now, the ruling class has compensated somewhat by enrolling an enlarged educated class into the ruling class as a kind of educated gentry. The educated get loot and plunder too. And the rulers have imported millions of immigrants that start out, as they always have, as ethnic minorities huddled in ethnic ghettos in the bigger cities.
And the rulers have got gentry women and gays imagining they are helpless victims!
But I think the rise of the Squad -- non-white women congerscritters -- and the various diverse Democratic presidential candidates show that the replacement for the white male ruling class is not yet "fit for purpose" as the Brits say. They all know how to act as they have been carefully taught in the progressive schools and universities. But they really haven't come up through a school of hard knocks as real revolutionaries do.
So I expect the near future to feature more efforts to censor and cancel annoying voices and messages, and I expect the rulers and their supporters to continue to fumble around. Because that is what you expect in a failing ancien régime.
But I think that the days of the current progressive ruling class are numbered.
I just hope they don't do anything stupid as they realize, more and more, that power is slipping out of their hands.
Wait. Of course they will do stupid stuff. That's what ancien régimes do. I just hope they don't do stupid stuff that gets people hurt.
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