I had a wonderful exchange via email with a reader, mjk.
Mjk posed several questions with the challenge for me to answer them through a column/essay. I took up the challenge and this is the result.
Here is the original question:
My question is simply: WHY?
Why do these billionaires want to impose a fascist state? What do they get from it? They have enough power. How much power and wealth can anyone utilize in a lifetime?
Why do Schumer, Pelosi et al., want to destroy America? No human institution is perfect. But America was as good as they come.
Beyond the question, the reader gave examples from history for me to consider. Mjk has considered dystopian literary works that described the consequences of action by totalitarians but the authors never ventured into why. So, why?
My usual response is power for power’s sake. But that doesn’t cut it. It’s deeper than that because there are other motivations driving the capture of power. I believe it is psychology, greed, narcissism, and the fact that so many of the people causing the problems have been born into a world where their feet have never touched the ground and no one has ever told them NO! They must all share a hole in the middle of their soul that can never be filled and since they do not believe in God, or any higher cause than their own existence, they are a god.
It is long and so I have broken it up into two parts. The second part is scheduled to go out tomorrow night so you can roll out of bed in the morning and immediately begin reading this gripping tale!
Part 1:
“Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the loss of faith in ourselves.”
—Eric Hoffer
Before we get into the why, let’s talk about how. In The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, one learns the answer to how, and some of the answers to why. I’ve read his book twice and the second time I walked away more confused than the first. It is a good indicator that academics wouldn’t have suited me.
I’m going to use this “True Believer for dummies” to guide myself through this opening.
True Believer was written in 1951, fresh off of the tumult of the first half of that century and Hoffer categorizes mass movements that can apply to all political, religious, and/or nationalists mass movements and, as was witnessed prior to World War II, socialist movements including offshoots like fascism. In reading the book, your mind is automatically drawn to the Bolsheviks and the Nazis but I believe that the same rules could be applied to the American Revolution as well. (And you can see many elements in the America First movement—this is not meant to be critical.)
He makes clear that movements usually don’t start amongst the chronically poor—they are living hand to mouth and their focus is on simple survival. And so, if economically driven, it becomes an uprising of those that had and have no longer. It can also begin with the marginalized in society. In our current situation in the U.S., we have two such movements brewing and they are at odds with each other—the progressive/Marxist/fascist “woke” movement we see on the left and the America First movement from the right. Political/historical observers should pull up a seat with some popcorn and favorite sugary drink and watch the show.
The movements usually begin with those who feel hopeless and have lost faith in their serving institutions. People are drawn to movements in order to make themselves feel whole again, powerful again, and on the “right” side of history.
These movements usually demand the loss of self-identity into the movement itself—it becomes a religious experience and they begin worshiping the godhead of the movement’s ideology but not necessarily the ideology. It gives them a tribe in which to belong; it gives them a strength that they find lacking in themselves; it provides comradery with the others who lost their faith and find it in the hollow promises of a new beginning. It is why religions of God, in totalitarian movements, are immediately disposed with—the movement is the religion.
As for leadership, Hoffer categorizes these personality types as men of words, fanatics, and practical men of action. The men of words are the propagandists. They lay out the movement but in terms that demonize the current power structure. They create an insatiable appetite for new beliefs and, I would inject, cast suspicions on the other side that mirror actual beliefs and/or actions by the movement. If they accuse the enemy of racism, for example, they are the racists.
The fanatics are the men and women of action. They don’t need the propaganda to stir their emotions and will sometimes act beyond or even contrary to the propaganda. These are the people you find in the streets, protesting, starting riots, using inflammatory language through mass media, bullying those who do not conform. You can see all of this in the current woke movement.
Then there is the leadership class, the men and women of practical action. These are the leaders that are either very visible in the beginning, or are behind the scenes, or, in a less organized but effective movement, emerge from the ranks to act. I would also propose there may be another type of actor and that would be those who are groomed for the position. I believe that Barrack Obama might be of this fourth kind. I also believe that the current administration is an emergency stop gap of the fourth kind. The current American leftist movement does not have a singular focal point and I believe that is by design.
“All mass movements … irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred, and intolerance.”
—Eric Hoffer
Hoffer posits that when successful, the movements always bring about a new social order that is worse than the one replaced and the people who supported the change find themselves captive to the new reality.
As an aside, I often refer to true believers in my writings and that explains the “why” to a certain extent. I also point out that the fanatics—those screaming talking heads and the white liberal trust fund babies in the streets—are the first to be discarded in a successful revolution; they are easily malleable and so perfect to recruit but turn dangerous when promises and outcomes are not to their expectation. That’s why, for example, the gender warriors should be careful. They’ll find themselves in the same camps the rest of us will inhabit.
Mjk asked why people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer (I would throw in Mitch McConnell) hate the country so much as to do what they do.
They are lower-end men of action. If you examine the rhetoric of today and compare it to years ago, many of them have changed positions on many different issues. Why is that? Have they had a change of heart, or as any flip-flopping politician would say, an evolution in their conviction? No. They do not have love or hate for anyone or anything. They are psychopaths. They surf the waves of power to gain what they believe will make them whole. Ten years ago, for example, Pelosi would have kicked AOC and the Squad to the curb. She sees that they have appeal—and are dangerous—and so she cuddles them to control. They will eventually end up back on the curb.
Schumer, on the other hand, is a man of below average intelligence and strategic thought. Instead, he may actually be a sociopath.
What’s the difference?
A sociopath retains a conscience of some sort; they may steal something from you, have a sense of guilt but that sense of guilt isn’t strong enough to keep them from stealing the next time. And they are subservient to psychopaths.
A psychopath has no conscious. They can steal with no compunction. They can stab you in the back and eat a turkey sandwich as they watch you die. You are not a human to them.
Both are narcissistic to the Nth degree.
The Clintons are an interesting case study from their very first appearance on the national scene. As they developed from the country bumpkin act to the highest seat of power, to his impeachment, and her insatiable need for power, it dawned on me that these two people have antisocial personality disorders (the official diagnosis for sociopathy/psychopathy) and will do anything to retain the power they imagine they have. I believe their marriage is a pact between two loveless devils to gain and retain power.
Bill is a sociopath. I think he “feels your pain” but not enough to truly empathize with you. He cannot control his desires which lead to unsafe behaviors and often threaten to derail their combined insatiable thirst. He’s adept at talking his way out of his digressions and, even in the most ridiculous manner, such as the definition of “is”, he gets away with it. But he does need cover. Luckily, he has Hillary.
Hillary is stone cold. As Secretary of State, it was reported, that when discussing Julian Assange and his perceived threat, she asked about taking him out with a drone. Everyone laughed at the table. But her.
The Clintons, I believe, while international players, are not puppet masters. They lack the sophistication and are really nothing more than very successful hucksters. The same goes for many of the other political leaders in our nation and for that matter, the world. They are ruled by antisocial personality disorders, narcissism, and self-righteousness (maybe I’m redundant).
Politicians are levers of power but they don’t pull levers in a grand sense. I’ve discussed in past columns or essays (whatever you care to call them) about the struggle and the organization of global power. When dealing at the global level, nation-states are silos for fascists to control just as major corporations and industries. Nations can call themselves democracies, theocracies, communist, socialist, or unicorn utopias. It makes no difference. They are all self-contained silos ripe for control.
As another aside, and for a subject I hope to broach in the future, there is now talk from the global fascists that globalism is dead. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, as well as His Galactic Majesty Klaus Schwab have suggested this, blaming the Ukrainian war and destruction of the just-in-time global supply chain; by tearing it down, may this be the next stage of the control of nation-silos?