Psychopaths in Suits
The Sudden and Catastrophic Collapse of Liberal Democracy
Thomas Hobbes proposed in Leviathan (1651) that in the construction of government, humans give up all their natural rights (freedom) in return for government protection. According to Hobbes, people needed defense from the awful State of Nature: wherein life is (famously) nasty, brutish and short. He called this a Social Contract: the surrender of personal freedom for the obvious benefits of government security and safety. This was a new and radical idea but now, four centuries later, most Americans buy into this scheme wholeheartedly. At the time, royal families ruled and their concept was that a king's power to govern came from God and not mortal men. One century later, John Stuart Mill, Tom Paine, Jefferson, and Madison (among others) would offer that government exists only by and through the consent of the governed in a democratic republic. In modern times President Woodrow Wilson (1912-1920) expanded this notion and decided it was his personal mission, and by extension that of the United States, to destroy monarchial and repressive government wherever he found it. He dragged a reluctant America into war with Germans, Hungarians, Turks and Bulgarians to do it. Here is part of his declaration of war speech that has served as a propaganda template for every authoritarian American President ever since:
We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts,--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the fights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.
Wilson didn't dedicate his own fortune, or his own blood, to be sure. That would be donated by the little people. But this outline; that America might bestow its moral, material and spiritual treasures upon the whole world and every nation in it, became the essence of United States foreign policy ever since. With this came a massive transfer of American wealth, and the blood of millions, to fund a policy of perpetual war. This is always presented as a noble American endeavor for the greater good of humanity, now and forever. Wilson asked Americans to forego their own families, communities, associations, wealth and happiness (national characteristics that have all since broken down), as well as their lives, for the benefit of the entire world's evolution and betterment. Tyrants of any sort needed to be disempowered and replaced by representative government with free and fair elections. From this point onward monarchy was presented as the least effective form of government. This is the current state of affairs and to question it invites ridicule and ruin.
The false premises of western liberal democracy
American democracy is a compulsory one. Without the right to secede, no democratic form of government is essentially different from monarchial or princely rule. In America the right to secede was effectively crushed when General Grant rode into Richmond and ended the American experiment in secession. In the police state that gradually emerged, the elected legislature may vote to change the mechanics of oppression but not the rule itself. Under the Hobbesian guise of protection, the people may not question government's right to rule and tax; only by how much their freedom will be limited and how much money will be taken: for even though the regime should exist to protect everyone's property rights, American democracy reserves its right to confiscate anyone's property when any bureaucracy rules it so. Therefore no American owns their home or anything of value. They lease it from a government that can take it at any time. The Sicilian Black Hand called this system Pay or Die. Americans are regulated and taxed not only by the federal government but by state and local municipal government as well. They bear all the characteristics of a nation and people defeated in war: heavily taxed, occupied by an omnipresent and ruthless army of federal enforcers, and often imprisoned at the whim of local dignitaries. They find themselves victims of a two-tiered system of justice; one for the working class and another for excessively paid government agents who are essentially immune from any sort of prosecution no matter what crimes they commit. Many Americans begin to see this now, but find themselves in a Hobbesian world in which they have few rights and are at the mercy of the state's protection racket. A tax-funded collection agency created allegedly to look after the people's interest is an absurdity. That agency will always demand more funds, and in the end will confiscate the entire wealth of the nation in order to defend the transfer of wealth from the tax payers to either the government agents themselves, or to some other favored group. This is why the ultra-rich often invest their resources offshore. The rest of us, the working class Adam Smith called the wealth of the nation, have to just sit down, shut up and take it.
Is mob democratic rule better than princely rule?
Modern people see princely rule as archaic and fundamentally unfair because participation in government is limited to the monarchial caste and their agents. Liberal democracy is deemed infinitely better because everyone can play a part. Anyone among the masses may not only vote (hallelujah) but can actually become part of the ruling bureaucracy as well. This ought to create a benevolent meritocracy; and for a while it did. But the best and the brightest didn't always rise to the top. The worst sorts of people eventually got there. Most of them are conmen who have never held a real job. The people who rule in the democratic west are primarily callous sociopaths whose only quest is political power and the good life that comes with it. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist:
Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this... That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow - but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.
Why did they do that?
Everyone, at one time or another, has probably asked that question when some bureaucrat takes an action that not only defies common sense but is obviously harmful to the public. The latest scam is releasing violent felons to prey upon the disarmed urban poor. It happens because the sociopaths in power enjoy the suffering and helplessness that ensues. Dressed in silk suits and briefed in talking points for the crowd, the erstwhile rights and hereditary privileges of the Prince can now be attained by anyone ruthless enough to get them. The difference is that the Prince viewed the nation and everything in it as his or her personal property. Thus they would, unless mad, be careful with the nation's resources and its people. The elected official, au contraire, correctly see themselves only as temporary caretakers. They become provisional princes with transitory ownership of property that are not theirs. He/she then proceeds to exert monopolistic control of the nation's wealth. However, unlike the hereditary prince, the modern civil servant actually owns nothing and never did. Government becomes a business where every elected official tries to take advantage of the nation's prosperity in the (relatively) short time they are in power. As a result, taxation in the liberal west far exceeds anything ever seen under monarchial rule. The wealth of the nation is then used to secure the bureaucratic class's maintenance of power. They use tax revenue to enhance not only their own personal wealth through various scams and misappropriations but even more disastrously, they use it to transfer assets from one group to another to secure votes and re-election. In our modern Age of Egalitarianism (now equity) this takes money from people who have it and gives it to people who don't. The innovative spirits that create wealth are shackled by excessive license fees and taxation. Assets are transferred to the electoral districts populated by the indentured working class supposedly for their use in the perpetual quest for abject survival. This is thought to improve their overall quality of life but it doesn't. In the United States 50 trillion dollars was transferred by taxes to inner city projects over the past 50 years. But they are the same as they ever were; rife with crime, dilapidated housing and disease. Not only that; it's now worse than ever. Individual property rights have no meaning in the egalitarian social democratic state either. All assets become public property that can be confiscated at any time by the all powerful bureaucratic caste and it happens all the time.
Psychopaths in Suits
Envy and greed are two of the Seven Deadly Sins. Every society, no matter where or when, is populated by people who desire other people's property. In monarchial rule this problem is mitigated by the fact that all property is owned by the princely caste. Since there are few of them and everybody knows who they are, they tend to be careful about whom they step on. In western democracy, where all property essentially belongs to the state (and therefore to no one in particular), fraud and misappropriation are endemic as the state inevitably evolves into a criminal enterprise.
Scientific American:
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