I have begun to articulate my Peasant Principle in application to life in these United States as I observe the decline of our society. What alerted me to this was my overuse of the metaphor of Sherwood Forest and my attraction to the order of feudalism. But what is a persistent reminder is the failure of the American middle class to hold fast to those things that made it great. I think our leadership has forgotten the use of the public and has failed to keep in place some simple restraints.
To use a metaphor, think of cops deployed at the Fourth of July night at the beach just before the fireworks start. If you think about the situation for a moment, you realize that there is absolutely no way that 50 cops can control a crowd of 100,000 unless that crowd exhibits some self-discipline. But in any case, the cops have to make a hard nudge in order to keep the tipping point of chaos from being reached. The cops need hegemonic power, which roughly translated means, don't even think about crossing this line.
Hegemonic power can only be exercised when people see it in their best interest not to get completely bent out of shape. This implies the use of a framework / ruleset / mythology / education. They all serve the same purpose which is to give the people inertia. If enough people exhibit any appreciable amount of groupthink, they become self-limiting. Ideas that might upset things, new ideas, radical ideas, or simply reactions, travel slower through large crowds of like-minded individuals. The purpose of leadership in exercising hegemonic controls is to use the weight of the crowd against it drawing away from that leadership. In other words, find out what the crowd believes and tell it what it wants to hear.
Now understand that as I describe the use of hegemony, I am being value neutral. I see this as a consequence of information theory. It's flies against the rules of 'information thermodynamics' to think that you can get mass audiences to turn their thinking on a dime. That would require vast amounts of energy. However there is entropy in all systems, including information systems. So there are gradients to be achieved by introducing chaos, or failing to police the crowd.
If a crowd's enthalpic instinct is toward modesty with its entropy towards immodesty, one can achieve a gradient by failing to reward modesty and rewarding immodesty. You can't turn a nation of women into whores in one generation, but you can give them the Pill and tell them that their need for sexual gratification is the same as a man's and let a Feminist movement do work at the margins for 50 years. You can fail to police and you can let some ideas trickle through. Sooner or later you get to a tipping point, and the immodesty of the crowd has become its defining characteristic. Then of course you have to push for the 'normalization' of the ever increasingly perverse in order to be Progressive, and you have to point to some Nirvana over the horizon. Moo-ve the crowd. Us a prod.
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Let's consider the fact of average intelligence. I will place an axiom here too, which is that the bourgie consumer is highly suggestible. One who doesn't need to spend a great deal of time using their brains to survive has excess brain space, given average intelligence, and their enthalpic instinct towards mental sophistication will move them towards learning stuff. I make use of the term enthalpic instinct because people generally understand that it takes work to avoid suffering and pain. Nobody gets bed sores on purpose. On the whole we're not that frickin' stupid. So what kind of stuff do you learn when you don't really need to know anything more to live in relative comfort?
You learn lies.
Why do you learn lies? Because you are a peasant, and you are not responsible for making things happen in the world. Therefore it's not important that you learn the truth. And since learning requires work and teaching requires work, there are economics as well as informational thermodynamics that make your chances of learning the valuable truth much less likely. It's not impossible, of course. I mean it's not like the Library at Stanford University is hidden in some secret underground facility. It's not as if the laws of physics, the rules of mathematics, the syntax of English or the text of the Constitution are not readily available. It's just that you're not hanging with the crowd of people who find that stuff absolutely compelling and pushing their enthalpic survival instincts to the max in absorbing those self-evident truths. You're simply not going to get there. Because you are a peasant.
But that's OK because you are in a whole crowd of uninformed, misinformed, uneducated (or mythologically edumacated) to remain under hegemonic control. Not because hegemony is evil, but because it is efficient. And since you are a member of that crowd, you understand your self-interest in the terms of that crowd's norms. Nobody is particularly compelled to become sociopathically radical against the ideas of their neighbors, and only the cops are trained to shove the right elbows at the right spots to moo-ve the crowd. You feel bad when you sit indoors reading a book instead of laughing with your friends on the beach - just like the kids in that McDonald's commercial on TV. They make having fun look so easy. And check out those dancers on MTV. I'm going to learn how to dance like that, then you'll have to put a ring on it. And we all are supposed to be married right?
Are you catching my drift here? You have to desire to be weird and transgressive to have an opportunity to guage the size of your crowd's limits. You have to shove people out of the way in order to get to the edge out where the cattle prods are. You have to look at eye level and see what the cops are doing when everybody else is staring at the fireworks and saying oooh and aaah.
The point I'm trying to emphasize out of this entire dynamic is yet to come, but I've set you up. I want you to read this, keeping in mind what I've said about the energy required to change the direction of an inertial crowd. But since you're a peasant and too lazy to read that, I'll just focus in on one key set of bullets, as a quote from Democrat Robert Reich speaking about the inevitables of healthcare reform.
- Younger people should pay more
- Healthier people should pay more
- Older people should just die- they’re “too expensive”
- There should be “less innovation” in medical technology
- You should not expect to live longer than your parents.
These are inevitables. They are the saws to everything you see. They are what totter when you teeter. If something goes up, these are what's going down. They are the left hand side of a thermodynamic equation that is balanced by the right hand of God. And they are the expensive truths that those who are actually responsible to running things in this world are bound to know.
But you are a peasant, and it is not inevitable that *you* would learn those truths. In fact, politicians in a democracy understand the rules of hegemonic power very well. It suits their purposes to tell you... exactly what you want to hear - something not too far off from what your inertial crowd already believes in its precious little heart of hearts. And the quid pro quo that you demand of your duly elected leader is that HE LIES TO YOU.
And you cannot change that. Do you want to know why? Do you really want to know why? OK I'll tell you why. Because voting is free. It's free. It's easy. It takes 5 whole minutes. And no matter what you tell yourself, in the economy of information, that's not a lot of energy. Hell, your vote doesn't even have your name on it. Neither does the poll that the politician actually listens to - that is when he's not actually being bought. You do know what a lobbyist is. He's somebody who is 50 times more connected than you, 20 times better paid, and only twice as smart. The lobbyist knows how to change a Congressman's vote, all you know how to do is get mad at Glen Beck or Keith Olbermann and tell your friends on Facebook. That's because you're a peasant.
Don't get mad at me. I'm a peasant too. But I've been a black nationalist and a black Conservative Republican, and I don't mind spending a little extra energy shoving you out of the way to eyeball the cops on the Fourth of July. At the very least, I'm a writer with six years of blogging and 7400 essays. So that's some enthalpic interest up an information thermocline, even though I don't expect a peasant like you to read it all..
I'm trying to be a free man. I've got nothing against peasants except that, well, you know. They're people and I'm still to Christianly humanist to piss all over them.
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Now let me talk about the strength of the American middle class. It's not an exceptional thing except there are exceptional leaders who understand what inertial values work towards the crowd's enthalpic interest in becoming and remaining free men. Those guys aren't around. And even though half the teenaged women in the peasantry are on the Pill halfway to Babylon, there still remain some paragons of purity and parental pride. Surely there are men in that crowd who seek ever to be better men, and those who by talent of discipline move towards clarion truths in spite of the roaring mendacious mumbles of the great unwashed boogedy beat.
The American middle class, those of us with no responsibility for being in the Slice (no John Geilguds are we to the Dudley Moores of the world) holding up the royal wankers of those who might have us killed for sport or spite, we might be our own owners. We might be free men with our little parcels and our own honest businesses and upright families and righteous neighbors and beloved communities. We might be independent and industrious, moral and cool too. It is not preordained that we roll in the mud of a depraved society with no backbone to sustain our eyes on God. But we move with a crowd ourselves.
But could we the People be a righteous crowd? Could our own inertia work for us? Might we adopt, dare i say it, Old School Values, and recognize that hegemonic power is being used to prod us in the wrong direction? Of course ideally, we want to trust our cops and know they are not elbowing us towards a deathmarch into the sea.
It's getting late. You understand what I'm saying. Keep your head up. Those fireworks are beautiful. But remember, you're still not yet free, even though you're middle class. And you ought to remember what lies are being repeated back to you, because that's what you paid for last November.
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