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

[Carl G. Estabrook]

...O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too...

--Ulysses, Troilus and Cressida [I, 3]


Brooks makes it clear that we've just got to start regarding more  
sympathetically that talk of the Führerprinzip from our great- 
grandparents' time.

After all, we have Decider with a Kill List...

--CGE


On Jun 26, 2012, at 5:35 PM, E. Wayne Johnson wrote:

> 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.
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss

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