Posted on 03/30/2009 9:51:43 AM PDT by betty boop
Barack Obama: Pied Piper of the Plethos
Ignorance, illiteracy, stupidity always have been relevant social factors. This has been the case in any historical human social organization one cares to name — from clan to nation-state.
In every civilization, there is a very thin upper stratum of the people who are concerned with questions of truth, justice, the good — in other words, with the life of reason, or of the human spirit if you prefer. Historically, such people have tended to believe these ultimate values have a claim on every man in terms of the constitution of the good order of his soul, and on the direction of his actions as they translate into the social sphere.
Such people are surrounded by a vastly larger mass of “stupid people” who simply do not see the world that way, generally because they are ignorant, thus personally disordered/disorderly, thus irresponsible — and (thus) ever needy. This mass of “stupid people” has been called: “slaves by nature.”
In Aristotle, we find the distinction between the mass of the people, the plethos — who basically function on the “stupid level” — and the spoudaioi — the prudent, virtuous, public-minded “mature men.” It is the latter class that actually maintains the civilization.
Nowadays, however, progressive educrats like Barack Obama’s old friend, Bill Ayers, teaches teachers to teach their pupils that these spoudaios characters are really nothing but a reactionary, usually male, usually white gang of fascist thugs who are selfishly trying to preserve their own interests against the just claims of disadvantaged people, who are usually either women or “people of color.” The spoudaioi are oppressors you see.
Regarding our present era, Eric Voëgelin had a warning for us:
If the establishment of the spoudaioi is disrupted by external events, then the civilization breaks down very rapidly within a generation. And that is the problem we have to deal with…. When certain disruptive events occur, civilization breaks down, and the plethos in the classical sense — the mass of passionately directed people who are more or less illiterate and who do not know what they are doing — come to predominate. (1)
In the American experience, an excellent example of the spoudaioi class would be the Founders and Framers themselves. The foundation of our rule of law was laid by these brilliant, classically-educated Christian men. Their magnificent legacy, especially the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, has been conveyed to us over the generations by other spoudaioi, including certain great presidents, jurists, and representatives of the people, as well as public-minded private people. That legacy is what created and sustained the freest, most just and prosperous nation in the history of mankind. The problem is, that line of genius is obviously running out.
For the fact is, America has become “a government of the plethos, by the plethos, and for the plethos.” Certainly, this was not what the great spoudaios Abraham Lincoln had in mind.
Case in point: Barack Obama is President of the Plethos of the United States, not of the whole People of the United States. For there is still a substantial majority of the people who, while not necessarily spoudaioi themselves, are well content to live by rules that promote liberty, personal autonomy, initiative, self-reliance, thrift, production, creativity, risk-taking — provided they aren’t being systematically looted by the State. We’ll just call this group “the middle class.”
The State’s interest in the matter, however, is to claim as much of the fruits of the labor and genius of the productive members of society as it can get away with, and then to transfer the loot to the unproductive, ever expanding politically-dependable (and dependent) plethos — to grease political “friends” that help it (1) gain power; (2) stay in power; and (3) expand its powers.
The Framers were very clear about this: Individual liberty (the person’s power over himself) vs. State power is truly a zero-sum game, in which one side can increase its power only by decreasing the power of the other. The very people who demand an increase in government benefits (i.e., expansion of the State) of one kind or another seem blissfully unaware of these dynamics. They do not realize they are “on the road to serfdom.”
It is quite clear that Barack Obama on his record is a socialist of the most progressive stripe. I gather he believes his great presidential mission is to “organize” the American “community.” But then, what would you expect of a man, whose résumé lists “community organizer” as his main professional experience?
Now, to organize the American community the way Obama wants it organized is going to cost a whole lot of money — so much that, if the entire U.S. productive economy were put up for sale tomorrow, the proceeds likely would not cover the projected costs of “organizing” America into the type and scale of healthcare, energy, education, cradle-to-grave income-maintenance, and God-knows-what-else policies that Obama says we Americans “deserve.”
Now Obama’s not going to hold a fire-sale of U.S. productive assets any time soon, for a very simple reason: He wants the entire productive base of the economy to be “nationalized” — that is transferred to State ownership — so he and his cronies can run the whole shebang as they see fit. So the strategy is to expropriate the wealth held in the hands of productive people. To do this, you have to hide the expropriation behind a screen of well-sounding words, which conceals the enormity of the extraordinarily opaque financial restructuring of the national economy, using the banking system as leverage, being transacted behind it. Yet smooth words of reassurance — or alternatively, the frequent calls to hit the panic button — cannot disguise the fact that a good deal of the net worth of many Americans — mainly the middle class — has melted away since Obama was elected.
One thing that community organizers get the hang of pretty quickly is how to mobilize the plethos as shake-down artists. ACORN specializes in this sort of thing, and Obama is an expert at it. He’s out there ginning up demand for government programs, which your average plethos person believes will come to him at little or no personal cost. Meanwhile, he’s being relieved of his personal responsibilities; increasingly it is the State that looks after his needs. He’s been “educated” that this is a proper function of the State; indeed, that it is his right to have all his needs and wants supplied without any trouble to himself. And not only that, but to think as he is told to think, to have no opinions that have not been blessed by his political “benefactors.” In thus rejecting his own humanity — which he probably doesn’t miss too much — he reveals he is “a slave by nature.”
And just plain dumb as a box of rocks, ignorant of American history and heritage — about which he evidently cares not a fig:
José: What a crazy world! The rich, who could pay cash, buy on credit. The poor, who have no money, must pay cash. Wouldn’t Marx say it should be the other way around? The poor should be allowed to buy on credit, and the rich should pay cash.
Manuel: But the storeowners who give credit to the poor would soon become poor themselves!
José: All the better! Then they could buy on credit too! (2)
Lest anyone claim the above dialog is “racist,” may I point out that, while “José” is obviously a card-carrying member of the Plethos Union, “Manuel” is not. Possibly “Manuel” is a storeowner himself. If so, regardless of his apparent Hispanic heritage, as a small businessman, Obama would fleece him just as badly as any White or Black or Asian proprietor.
It appears that President Obama is no friend of small business, the backbone of the economy and the engine of the middle class — which is the strength and genius of the American system.
Wealth has a tendency to accumulate in an even smaller number of hands of the ruling class; the number of independent proprietors, the mainstay of liberty, will decrease; and the end is an economic despotism of a small minority that rules the people for its private interest. (3)
“Manuel” has the common sense to understand how the world actually works. Unless someone is creating wealth through productive activities, there is no basis for credit formation. Wealth usually sits in banks, forming the bank reserves that must be there to back up the issuance of credit. When storeowners and other people who create value in the economy become poor themselves, there is no wealth generation, no bank reserves, and lending dries up. Not to mention that wealth-creating productive activity dries up as credit becomes unavailable. It’s a vicious cycle.
Marxism assumes that one can still get golden eggs from a dead goose. It just never explains how this is actually to be done in the real world.
But Obama and Geithner have got it all figured out: The government issues more taxpayer-obligated debt and gives it to the banks to secure their capital base/reserves. But now we are issuing public debt that taxpayers must repay as the basis for private (so far) bank lending. Considering that taxpayers are not only responsible for financing the bank bailout-out, but are also responsible for financing the trillion-dollar-a-year deficits in Obama’s federal budget, plus the trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities in the Social Security/Medicare system, in what way is the “Geithner plan” effectively different from a Ponzi scheme? One that’s likely to come crashing down on our children and grandchildren? After having impoverished this generation, the Obama policies will impoverish our progeny as well, and for generations to come.
Meanwhile, Obama plays Pied Piper to the growing mass of the plethos. They see no danger in following him, thinking only to receive “free” goodies from the State. They rarely pay income taxes themselves these days. They think all the other taxpayers are going to be “good for it.” Always. Forever. Even while the Obama administration seems to be doing everything in its power to ensure that they won’t be: You can’t get blood out of a stone.
In the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, whatever or whoever followed the Pied Piper met with doom — whether it was the rats, which he drowned in the river, or the children that were forever lost to their families when the Piper “disappeared” them after they followed him out of town. The point is, both the rats and the children were utterly unsuspecting that the Pied Piper deliberately meant to harm them. After all, he wore “a coat of many-colored, bright cloth,” and played delightfully on a small fife. He was there to impress, delight, and to charm….
After absconding with the children of Hameln, the Pied Piper was never seen again. Alas, but the same cannot be said of Obama who is still very much with us, evidently doing everything in his power to transform the greatest nation on earth into a Third-World banana republic, with himself as its Dear Leader, by any means fair or foul.
And on the record so far, it appears he prefers the foul.
Citations:
(1) Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes, New York: Penguin Books, 2008, p. 162f.
(2) Eric Voëgelin, “Autobiographical Statement at Age 82,” in The Drama of Humanity, Vol. 33 of The Collected Works of Eric Voëgelin, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004, p. 437.
(3) Eric Voëgelin, History of Political Ideas, Volume 26 of The Collected Works of Eric Voëgelin, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999, p. 78.
©2009 Jean F. Drew
March 30, 2009
Thought you might find this of interest!
Right and Wrong
- Joe Jackson
Stop everything
I think I hear the President
The pied piper of the TV screen
Is gonna make it simple.
He’s got it all mapped out
And illustrated with cartoons.
Too hard for clever folks to understand.
Yeah, they’re more used to words like:
ideology...
But they say it’s not the issue
ideology...
They’re not talking ‘bout right or left
They’re talkin’ ‘bout, t-t-t-alkin’ ‘bout,
Right and wrong - do you know the difference?
Right and wrong - do you know the difference
‘Tween the right and the left, and the east and the west
What you know and the things that you’ll never see?
So what ya think?
You like the Yankees or the Mets this year?
And what about this latest war of words?
What about the Commies?
You know I saw the news last night
All illustrated with cartoons.
So when they come with that opinion poll,
They’d better not chose words like:
ideology...
Try to tell me bout the issues
ideology...
Who’s side are you on?
‘Cause we’re talkin’ ‘bout, t-t-t-alkin’ ‘bout,
Right and wrong - do you know the difference?
Right and wrong - do you know the difference
‘Tween the right and the left, and the east and the west
What you know and the things that you’ll never see?
Right and wrong - do you know the difference?
Right and wrong - do you know the difference
‘Tween the right and the left, and the east and the west
What you know and the things that you’ll never see?
What a glorious essay, dearest sister in Christ! The metaphor is perfect and beautifully explored.
Thank you!!!
Thank you so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your kind words of support!
Thank you so much for posting these lyrics!
Thank you, dearest sister in Christ!
Sound like a great definition of "plethos" to me, william clark! Thank you so much for your post!
I've sensed a shadow gov't since the Clintonoids.. Bush Jr. just resembles Alfred E. Neuman a little too closely.. and the poseurs he ran against him in 2000/2004 were a little too convenient.. And John Mclaim was the clincher for me in 2008..
The Plethos are being controlled like sock puppets.. in a brilliant way..
They ran Bush Jr. as stand in for Alfred E. Nueman and "Kingfish Stevens" Obama.. to display their control.. Somebody is laughing somewhere.. loudly..
I am NOT amused..
You can survive government of the plethos if the plethos are educated by the spoudaios, and aspire to virtue themselves. In this country we always valued government "by the people" because "the people" were never viewed as being rabble, they were the salt of the earth, they were the farmers and builders and technicians who built this country. "Virtue" was not seen as belonging to some kind of elite, it was the stuff of which the uncommon common man was made of. The founding fathers were believers almost to a man, but so too were the common men in the street. The founding fathers were well read in the classics, but so too was anyone with an education, and even the uneducated had his bible which was well worn from use.
If your "educators" have come to fear and despise virtue, and no longer teach it, no longer teach the principles upon which civilization rests, they have passed from being the civilizing force they were intended to be. The more of this kind of miseducation you get, literally the less educated you really are. The irony of a modern education is that, having dropped any pretense of teaching virtue, they don't teach much hard information either. The longer you spend under the tutelage of these people, the less you know and the less capable you are of independent thought.
If you want to preserve the republic, nothing is more important than educating the generation that comes after you. There is nothing more important than that. If the educational institutions no longer fulfill that roll then you have to find or build one that will. We are always only one generation away from losing it all. Fail to teach the next wave of citizens and it can all disappear in a generation.
Dear marron, what an absolutely magnificent essay-post!
AMEN! to everything you said.
And Praise the Lord!
An absolutely beautiful essay, betty!
My thoughts follow, which I begin with a quote from Dr. Terry G. Shaw, “To understand...principles of human behavior...we must first begin by accepting the basic premise that all humans are born hedonists (aka narcissists) and have an intrinsic need to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and engage in those activities that best accomplish both with the least amount of effort.”
Betty wrote: In every civilization, there is a very thin upper stratum of the people who are concerned with questions of truth, justice, the good
Now the issue comes down to this: Since we all come into the world more or less the same, what intrinsic ability, or gift, separates the ‘truth seeker’ from everyone else?
My contention is that the ‘truth and justice seeker’ is gifted with the germ of an ability which, with use over time, allows him to observe and to learn from both the poor and the good choices made by others.
This type is both an observer of human nature and a long sufferer of it, for in willfully choosing not to become what he observes by way of poor-choice makers, he is-—in times and places of macro-evil-— made to suffer for his choice. GK Chesterton comes to mind as a wonderful example of this type.
Antitheism, with its rejection of God, truth, morality, free will, purpose, design, and meaning cannot account for that which it denies: truth, free will, and truth seekers.
Dennis Prager made what I consider to be a profound claim. He said that from the beginning, the worst of our species have been killing off the best. Now if the purpose served by the ‘best’ is to serve as examples for the plethos, then by killing off the ‘best’ the plethos are perhaps more or less doomed, or so goes the diabolical thinking behind this scheme.
Well, that plan seems to be going forward nicely. Plus the other way you can wipe out a culture is to inundate it with immigrants who do not share your core values, and do not plan to acculturate. That plan seems to be afoot and proceeding well, too.
We’ve always been a nation of immigrants, who were coming here to escape the wars and hatreds and famines they left behind them. The ambient here required self-reliance, and the educators taught along with the 3Rs the principles upon which the republic rested. Remember when public education was considered the great unifier?
It still is, but its content has been stripped away. In its absense there is little to displace what ought to have been left behind. Instead you have educators who feed the resentments that have destroyed other lands rather than offering the alternative these people came here looking for.
We’ve got to do better.
In many cases the family arriving here from country x gets it better than our graduating class of seniors do, but in half a generation their own kids will be graduating from these same schools and the chance will have been lost.
I begin with a quote from Dr. Terry G. Shaw, “To understand...principles of human behavior...we must first begin by accepting the basic premise that all humans are born hedonists (aka narcissists) and have an intrinsic need to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and engage in those activities that best accomplish both with the least amount of effort.”
Which is to say that human beings are born as animal nature and not much more. They will likely stay that way unless they are acculturated into the core values that make human societies livable. The more and longer they are left in their "natural state," the more disorderly society becomes. Sooner or later, you have to call in the cops.
You wrote: "Since we all come into the world more or less the same, what intrinsic ability, or gift, separates the ‘truth seeker’ from everyone else? My contention is that the ‘truth and justice seeker’ is gifted with the germ of an ability which, with use over time, allows him to observe and to learn from both the poor and the good choices made by others."
That's an excellent question, spirited irish: "what separates the 'truth seeker' from everyone else?" Aristotle claimed that "All men desire to know." Which is weird, because he's well aware of the plethos. So it seems to me Aristotle has overstated the case, and that it's only reasonable men who "desire to know." So perhaps the "germ" of the ability is simply reason itself. Reason is something that can be cultivated. But you have to value it first.
But if you have it, you are better able to trust your observations so to evaluate others' choices, both poor and good. History provides a practically unlimited field for such observation. And then we have our own experiences of "choices, both poor and good" to factor in.
But in the end, I don't know why some people do have the desire to know, who do believe that the search for Truth is somehow essential to them. I just consider this, finally, yet another divine mystery.
Yes, it seems that Chesterton was made to "pay" for his Christian orthodoxy by being branded an anti-Semite. This charge is highly dubious. I don't think it ever really "stuck."
Dennis Prager's claim that "the worst of our species have been killing off the best" is certainly understandable. But then they've been killing each other off, too, from time immemorial. They're all "passion," and "no brains." In killing off "the best" of the species — which I take to mean the carriers of the culture — they make their own existence more difficult and insecure. In the end, the whole society is swallowed up in the ensuing chaos.
BTW, I, too, suspect there's a "diabolical" root at the bottom of all this. The plethos are being used as pawns in this game but are otherwise expendable, as far as this evil genius is concerned. It only wants to use the plethos to go after the spoudaioi who, after all, are the faithful ones and thus carry a much "higher bounty."
Thank you so very much for your outstanding essay/post spirited irish!
Actually I do, marron. Back in the day when there was civics class for everybody, and the college-bound could take all the Latin they could stand, in addition to a modern language requirement. American history did not start with the Civil War; there was rigorous science and math, and English class focused on classical texts. There were Christmas assemblies in which one could actually sing the Ave Maria or the Jesu Bambino without getting arrested or expelled. And every school day began with the Pledge of Allegience and a Moment of Silence.
My mother's parents were immigrants from Poland, coming over in 1913. Although they were members of a thriving Polish community in Rhode Island, they rose their seven kids to be Americans. Neither ever really mastered English; but they insisted their kids did. Four of those kids — one was my mother — served in World War II. All were successful Americans, and raised successful American families.
It seems those days are over....
Thank you ever so much for writing, dear marron!
I have heard quite a few people say recently that they are astounded at the speed with which Obama and the 111th are realizing their left-wing agenda. A friend said to me just the other day, ‘It’s amazing that Obama has steered our republic more strongly to the left in just two months than all our other left-leaning leaders have in the past two decades combined.’
While on the surface that may be true, Obama is simply spreading the icing on the cake that has been in the oven for fifty years. And he is able to do so with such speed and intensity simply because the minds of the Plethos have been sufficiently prepared to allow for it, without the widespread outrage or alarm that would be expected in response.
For the past five decades Marxists, or Marxist sympathizers, have been infiltrating our public education system, our ‘higher education’ system, our entertainment industry, and our mainstream media, to the point where they now virtually control the thoughts of the large majority of Americans.
Ninety-plus percent of what is taught in what passes for ‘education’ in America is now laced with, if not permeated by, left-leaning demagoguery.
Nintey-plus percent of what passes for ‘entertainment’ in America is now focused on either promoting the ideology of the left, or turning the nation’s attention to bread and circuses while that which is truly important goes unnoticed.
Ninety-plus percent of what passes for ‘news reporting’ is simply leftwing propaganda, or subterfuge aimed at interesting the populace in nonsense while keeping that which threatens the realization of the left’s agenda out of eye- and earshot of the citizenry.
Thanks to all three of the above malevolent forces, we have now reached the unenviable point at which the (large, I’m afraid) majority of the citizenry not only have no clue regarding the noble foundations of their republic – and the fact that those foundations are being premeditatedly dismantled – but also have been taught to suspect, even despise, those who understand from whence we came, and who value that heritage (i.e. a superb illustration of the Bill Ayers syndrome you so beautifully describe).
I go to bed each night in veritable disbelief at the latest assault on our Constitution that occurred that day in Washington. And I invariably awaken the next morning to witness a new and even more obscene one.
Take this morning, for instance. It is quite a surreal experience to learn that the President of the United States has effectively fired the chairman and CEO of General Motors, and is now dictating the terms under which the corporation may (or may not, apparently at his discretion) continue to exist.
There is so much wrong, unconstitutional, and unjust about that state of affairs that it makes one’s head spin.
The man performing the tyrannical maneuvers was a major contributor to the catastrophic economic conditions (an example of one of Voëgelin’s disruptive events) that have, at least in part, resulted in the automakers’ financial problems.
The man performing the tyrannical maneuvers has never so much as run a business. As a matter of fact, the only job he has held, the performance of which would result in a meaningful contribution to society, has been that of a one-term senator. And he never even took that job seriously, having sponsored no meaningful legislation, and having missed far more votes than most of his fellow senators. And yet he has the audacity and arrogance to believe that he is qualified to dismantle the U.S. Constitution and dictate all manner of economic and social policy, including holding in his hands the future of one of the largest corporations in the history of the world.
God bless you for having the courage to ‘tell it like it is’ regarding the mentality of the majority of the citizenry: dumb as a box of rocks, ignorant of American history and heritage — about which he evidently cares not a fig. I’ve never heard it said more candidly, or more succinctly.
The American Tyrant’s approval rating stands today at 59% -- with nearly three out of five of our countrymen either (1) approving of the lightening speed with which the socialization of America is now occurring – not to mention the fact that the man at the helm is probably no more qualified to occupy the White House than is the president of their local Chamber of Commerce, or (2) not really even giving a damn in which direction their country is headed, just as long as their favorite contestant on American Idol doesn’t get eliminated this week.
Individual liberty (the person’s power over himself) vs. State power is truly a zero-sum game, in which one side can increase its power only by decreasing the power of the other.
While that may appear to be a simple observation to some, it is anything but. And, as you so insightfully point out, betty, the large majority of the American people either (1) do not recognize the zero-sum nature of that precious dynamic, or (2) do not value liberty sufficiently to see to it that the power of the state remains miniscule and clearly-defined, as our Founders demanded.
I included the following picture, taken at an Obama rally in June of last year, in one of the essays on my weblog.
I don’t know the young women in the foreground (and, should my impressions of them be false, I offer apologies in advance), but the faces of those two young women in the foreground somehow epitomize for me the modern American Plethos: adoring mental adolescents, who simply want to be allowed to go to the mall, download music/noise, and worship celebrity. Plethos poster girls for whom political allegiance is determined by catchy slogans and white, toothy smiles. Unable to recite for you one sentence from the U.S. Constitution. Unable to tell you in which century the American Civil War was fought. And completely unaware that citizenship requires allegiance, duty, vigilance, knowledge and personal responsibility.
I am sixty-two years old. I remember when my Dad was exactly the same age as I am now. Having just retired, he said to me, ‘I have seen America’s best days. Although I would like to live another twenty or thirty years, I do not look forward to seeing her worst, but I fear they are just over the horizon.’
He passed away shortly after 9/11/01. As we all were, he was devastated by the events of that day, not only because of the loss of life, but because those tragic events represented to him the fact that we had let our guard down during an era in which the enemies of America, both within and outside of our borders, were stronger and more determined than ever before. And he feared that the patriotism and vigilance that followed the attacks would be short-lived. Although I miss him terribly, I am somehow glad that he has been spared the need to witness what has occurred in the 7½ years since. It would break his heart.
God bless you, dear betty! You are a modern American patriot, and an inspiration to us all in these troubling times.
~ joanie
Allegiance and Duty Betrayed
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