19 December 2012

Audacious Oligarchy Reprise - A Question of Balance


Once again, that great summation of the Anglo-American experiment in crony capitalism by Robert Johnson.

If you can do nothing else, stop making excuses for those who promote the oppression of the financial interests, and stop listening to those who do.

Law is how the just associate to protect themselves against injustice and the wickedness of the world.

And if you charge forward, as happens from time to time, to willfully and recklessly tear down the laws in the name of some misbegotten ideology, and you stop and turn round, the winds of oppression that blow across the land will knock you down, no matter who you are, or how self-sufficient and powerful you may imagine yourself to be.

When you take an admirable concept and blind it, taking it to some imbalanced extreme by sticking an 'ism' on the end of it, you all too often unleash the madness, and the whirlwind.

If government has stopped working for the public interest of justice for all you reform it, you do not further weaken and burn it to the ground and destroy it in the vain hope that something better will accidentally come forward from some well-spring of natural goodness in the worst of us who serve only themselves, and the will to power.

You can believe what you will, but you will be accountable for what you believe.

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Edmund Burke



If there is any significant weakness in this model I have constructed it is that it does not easily represent the extreme position of anarchism, or its little brother, libertarianism. I think that it is because they are 'no model' or rather a model of social disorganization. But I am giving it some thought.

But they stand in no middle ground, but an extreme on another scale. And I say they care naught for individual rights, because they adopts the law of the jungle, that might makes right and that each person stands alone. It is a romantic, almost utopian, view of the world that sounds good to an adolescent, but which one might quickly outgrow as they reach adulthood and start a family.

On the other end of that scale would be total government, or statism, which is part of the basis of the model below. As most extremes, the statists and the anarchists are so off center that they see only one another, and anyone who is not them appears the other. This is how most ideological groups tend to coalesce as they become something self-observing and self-perpetuating.