Decline And Fall

     At each election we vote in a new set of politicians, insanely assuming that they are better than the set turned out. And at each election we are, as they say in Motherland, done in. – H. L. Mencken

     Among the things I’ve been missing lately are the penetrating and erudite essays of Co-Conspirator Dystopic a.k.a. Thales, both here and at his personal site The Declination. In his emissions, Dystopic presented a deeply thoughtful and knowledgeable case that the United States that we’ve known and loved is on a one-way trip to a destination freedom-loving Americans would never have chosen for themselves. Of course, it wasn’t We the People who chose it, but the strategists and kingmakers of the political Establishment. These don’t rule us directly, of course. Rather, they select and carefully groom puppets to present to us as the only thinkable choices for “our leaders.” Then they run the “leaders.”

     This has never been quite so obvious as in the case of the current occupant of the Oval Office. Joseph Robinette Biden is so demonstrably unfit for the presidency that his selection for the post constitutes the ultimate triumph of black humor. It compels us to question the very evidence before our eyes, for that evidence suggests all but irrefutably that those gray eminences have aimed us at national suicide intentionally and with malice aforethought.

     Why would a group of power-brokers, firmly in command of the richest and most successful nation in the history of Mankind, want to steer the galleon it’s captured onto the rocks?

     Sadly, only one answer fits the data.

     Great thinkers have struggled throughout the centuries with the problem of explaining human cruelty. Thus wrote Robert Burns:

Many and sharp the num’rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves,
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heav’n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn, –
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!

     And it is so. Not all of us are perpetually cruel, of course. But most of us have known the lash of cruelty at some point in our lives…and many if not all of us have also known its appeal.

     Cruelty to others is the purest expression of power:

     ’The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.’ O’Brien paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: ’How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’
     Winston thought. ’By making him suffer,’ he said.
     ’Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.’

     The above passage is a kind of syllogism. If those over whom you wish to wield power are not suffering at the moment, it becomes possible to doubt your power over them. But in the mind of one who recognizes nothing as immune to his decrees, that which is doubted becomes illusory, even insubstantial. He must swing into action. He must exert his power in a fashion that will produce palpable results…palpable suffering.

     Couple this bit of reasoning with the oft-repeated maxim that we should assume that a man intends the foreseeable consequences of his actions.

     To a sane man, a preference for power over all other things must seem incomprehensible. Yet most of us have at least a hint of a longing for authority. Authority means you’re important. You matter more than Joe Schmoe who doesn’t have it. You’re closer than he is to the elite.

     Those strategists and kingmakers who select and groom our “leaders” just have a lot more of a taste for it than you or I. Indeed, to the ones at the pinnacle of our society, it’s the only thing that matters. Great wealth is all very well, but once you have all the comforts, all the pleasures, and all the status symbols, of what use is another billion? It’s more satisfying to flex your money muscles, to deploy what you have to massive effect upon the unwashed and unsuspecting. Then you get to wallow in the results: the proof that you have real power.

     Don’t look to the puppets. Don’t puzzle over their vagaries, their frequent self-contradictions, or their contradictions of one another. They’re a living curtain over the real power-wielders, the men who hold their strings. While those strings sometimes become visible, as for example in the case of the Biden family, it is beyond our power to sever them. That’s a great part of why the puppets were chosen.

     The true Establishment is not the gaggle of office-holders upon whose emissions the mainstream media focuses. That focus is an indispensable part of the charade. It’s the men writing their lines and programming their teleprompters.

     In brief, which I seldom am, our ongoing decline:

1. Was deliberately designed by persons whose names are obscure at best;
2. Is being carefully managed by them and others of their kind;
3. To bring about the ultimate demonstration of power.

     There were many components to their strategy. I’ve written about many of them here and elsewhere. Spend a couple of hours in the Baseline Essays section if you’d like to review them. The point of this tirade is their motive: to prove that the power they have amassed over us is absolute and unopposable.

     They are a death force. There’s no telling how much death will satisfy them. Indeed, there might be no upper bound.

     In 2016, an Outsider slipped through the gates. For four hope-filled years, he labored to deprive the Establishmentarians of their power. Their outrage was impossible to conceal. It leaked out on numerous occasions and in several ways. We paid it too little attention.

     They could not abide Donald Trump. He had to go. I have no doubt that had their election-theft machinations proved insufficient, they would have contrived his death. Should he threaten their grip a second time, he’ll be in mortal danger from the outset. So will anyone else who dares to defy them.

     Our fall is drawing near.

     For those who marvel at our ability to stagger from crisis to crisis without experiencing a disaster and think we can continue indefinitely to overload our economic and social system with laws of plunder and legislative nonsense, I will remind you that the man who is guillotined is breathing right up to the moment the blade hits his neck. — “John Galt”

     See also this essay.