[Peace-discuss] lick the boots of thy masters, you worm.

[E. Wayne Johnson]

The strange thing is that this reptilian spawn of a maggot really and 
truly believes in this shtuff.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/opinion/brooks-the-follower-problem.htm

....Then there is our fervent devotion to equality, to the notion that 
all people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect. It’s 
hard in this frame of mind to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up 
others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves.

But the main problem is our inability to think properly about how power 
should be used to bind and build. Legitimate power is built on a series 
of paradoxes: that leaders have to wield power while knowing they are 
corrupted by it; that great leaders are superior to their followers 
while also being of them; that the higher they rise, the more they feel 
like instruments in larger designs. The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials 
are about how to navigate those paradoxes.

These days many Americans seem incapable of thinking about these 
paradoxes. Those “Question Authority” bumper stickers no longer 
symbolize an attempt to distinguish just and unjust authority. They 
symbolize an attitude of opposing authority.

The old adversary culture of the intellectuals has turned into a mass 
adversarial cynicism. The common assumption is that elites are always 
hiding something. Public servants are in it for themselves. Those people 
at the top are nowhere near as smart or as wonderful as pure and 
all-knowing Me.

You end up with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties 
that try to dispense with authority altogether. They reject hierarchies 
and leaders because they don’t believe in the concepts. The whole world 
should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority 
is suspect and each individual is king.


***

The fundamental political question is why do people obey a
government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves,
to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from
servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to
serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.
- Etienne de la Boetie.