Category: military

Charles Murray reviews a leftwing tome on the topic in the Claremont Review of Books: Meritocracy’s Cost

Check it out and come back.

Jordan Peterson frequently points out that hierarchies are natural and inevitable, from lobster fights to human IQ, and that hierarchies tend to corruption. This is the framework for “absolute power corrupts…”

The question is not how we eliminate the inevitable, but how we control the consequences.

Harrison Bergeron is an example of what happens when a corrupt hierarchy is put in charge of eliminating hierarchies.

Freedom of conscience is the fundamental human method of hierarchical control. Which is why corrupt hierarchies attack free speech and institute thought police. You can’t say “All Lives Matter,” “Trans males are not women,” or “Let’s try ivermectin.”

The corruption in our governing meritocracies, by which I mean the academic, military, political, economic, and cultural Anointed* – concentrated in, and supported by, our major population centers – threatens to bring down the Republic.

What is to be Done?
-V. Lenin, 1902

*Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, 1996

“…the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?”

“Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right—creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.”

“. . ideology. . . is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criteria of success and failure. —Jean-François Revel1”

“What is seldom part of the vision of the anointed is a concept of ordinary people as autonomous decision makers free to reject any vision and to seek their own well-being through whatever social processes they choose. Thus, when those with the prevailing vision speak of the family—if only to defuse their adversaries’ emphasis on family values—they tend to conceive of the family as a recipient institution for government largess or guidance, rather than as a decision-making institution determining for itself how children shall be raised and with what values.”

“The vision of the anointed is one in which ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from ‘society,’ rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by ‘society.”