After the Dictatorship of the Intellectuals

trying to imagine something better

If you are a lefty intellectual in America the endless outrages of activism are just the kids doing the latest thing. Nothing to see here. I read a guy that pulled up a bunch of 19th century thinkers that found America and Americans crazy over a century ago. So nothing to worry about. It’s always been a bit crazy.

Permit me to disagree. Yes, a bunch of college girls protesting for Palestine is indeed just a bunch of kids cosplaying revolutionaries — what they learned in Oppression 101. But the history of the past 300 years is littered with violent revolution and rebellion led by educated men determined to change the world with politics.

And Job One for all of them is to destroy the Enemy. If you are Sam Adams & Co. you are outraged by the idea of paying taxes to King George to pay for the French and Indian War, so War of Independence. If you are a lawyer in Paris in 1789 you are damned if you will pay a single franc to that bloody Austrian queen and the aristos that got all the best jobs in the French royal bureaucracy, so over to the Bastille. If you are Marx flummoxed by the Industrial Revolution you are determined to make the bourgeoisie pay for exploiting the suffering workers, so revolution baby. If you are Lenin you are going to send the noble landowners packing. If Mao it’s the Chinese landowners.

In the US our liberal friends were first determined to free the slaves, then whack the malefactors of great wealth, then ditch the economic royalists, then demolish the segregationists, and now fight the white oppressors and settler-colonialists. What heroism! But what would have happened without the Civil War, without dinging corporations, without making the world safe for democracy, without the fascist New Deal, without beating up the South in the Sixties, without beating up white middle class males for the last half century? What difference would it have made?

German sociologist Georg Simmel says that human society always means hierarchy and domination.

He makes the important point that we humans are very seldom held under complete coercive domination. It's just that, most of the time, we judge the price of freedom too high to take advantage of it.

So we put up with authority.

Back in the old days, we lived in a multilevel hierarchy: from family to community to local landowner to regional baron to king. It was a static society and people knew their place in a face-to-face world.

But then came “freedom” and Simmel says that freedom “permits the strong to exploit the weak and the clever to outpace the stupid.” So people stopped fighting against aristocratic privilege and switched to fighting inequality.

Obviously something has gone wrong in modern society where under communism and fascism we experience extreme domination and inequality. And even in democracies most people work for large employers, corporate or government, with a highly developed hierarchy. Most of us judge the price of owning our own business too high to venture it. And then we pay 35 to 50 percent of our income to the government. For what?

Our lefty friends have been saying for 200 years that any inequality is a scandal; that we must have equality; and we must have powerful government to protect us against the dominators and enforce equality. Only, of course, once you have powerful government you have inequality that would make a medievel peasant blanch.

If we concede that inequality is inevitable, the question then becomes: how to moderate inequality. I’d say that the current approach, to empower the educated class to run the government and set the rules, has proven a disastrous failure, from Stalin and Mao to FDR and LBJ and Obama. So what do we do now?

First, we must end the Dictatorship of the Intelligentsia. That means no comprehensive plans, no gigantic government programs beyond defense, no administrative regulation. No activists and their mostly peaceful protests.

OK, then what?

I believe that new order should be based on the concept of honor, which is how humans regulate each other without force. In Honor: a Hisstory James Bowman describes honor among men as a reputation for courage. That means standing up to the baddies and helping your friends. Honor among women is a reputation for chastity. That means doing good and shunning evil.

Right now standing up to the enemy and gifting your friends has been corrupted by government. And so has doing good and shunning evil. I say that we need to offload as much as possible of government to ordinary people.

I say that in the new age we will have a Brotherhood of the Ordinary Middle Class to regulate the baddies and encourage the goodies. It will be called OMC Bros for short. Of course this will just be the apex of a whole male hierarchy of clubs and male bonding.

I say that in the new age we will have a Sisterhood of Neighborhood Women to look after people that need help and shun people that are anti-social. It will be the center of an unknowable social web of women interacting with each other and helping each other as only women know how.

Crazy you say? But with the election of Donald Trump in the US and the rise of populist nationalism all over the world, we are seeing the diminution of the intelligentsia and the rise of the ordinary middle class. Something is going to change, and we may as well start speculating about it.

Fiirst, I think, should be a song about the OMC Bros.