A PERSISTENT MYTH throughout history – one that seems to perpetuate itself in society after society, no matter how often proved wrong and no matter at what cost – is that a populace can be forced to behave as rulers see fit. – Harold E. Pepinsky and Paul Jesilow, Myths that Cause Crime.
Everywhere totalitarians rule today, they do so only by an unrelenting war of mythical agitprop and terrorism against truth the human spirit; and everywhere the wisest, most courageous and most decent human beings wage an unrelenting guerilla war against them and seize even the slightest chance to escape or to launch desperate attacks on them. – Jack D. Douglas, The Myth of the Welfare State
Radicals who believe that they can separate the task of developing a theory from that of changing society are not in fact acting without a theory, but with one that is tacit and therefore unexaminable and uncorrectable. – Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology
Introduction
This post is my effort to think through what totalitarian is in the medical tyranny, oncoming digital slavery and legalized lawlessness. Largely because professional sociology has fulfilled the totalitarian vision of Auguste Comte, I am alarmed that history is not repeating itself but that it never stopped being totalitarian. I have had, therefore, to reach back into the hazy past of sociology when there was real interest in freedom and diagnosing the processes of totalitarianism. What I am seeing now is that the discipline is marching in ‘lockstep’ with the cult of vaccinology and supplying governments with the technocratic methods of social control rather than applying its tools such as ‘moral panics’, ‘stigma’, ‘scapegoating’, ‘ceremonies of ritual degradation’ and critiques of bureaucracy to resist totalitarianism.
Professional sociologists have ever been prostitutes, seeking financial reward and entry into the halls of power, with only the most troublesome – like C. Wright Mills, Alvin Gouldner, Martin Nicolaus, Dusky Lee Smith and Sidney Willhelm – offering a counter to the modern-day Comtean ideologues. I have had to read back into the 20th century, especially the work of ‘conservative’ sociologists such as Jack D. Douglas and Robert Nisbet to get a handle on the conceptual tools and theoretical perspectives to help me interpret and resist the unfolding dystopia. I do not agree with everything they have to say, especially in this instance Jack D. Douglas. But as said by Dr. David Martin, one of the key individuals resisting omnicide and totalitarianism, ‘creativity takes priority over consensus’.
There will be much to disagree with in this post, but it is my own creative endeavor to make sense of the normalization of sociopathy, legalized lawlessness and State-sponsored racketeering. But I write this post for two other reasons: 1) to encourage ‘common sense’ anti-totalitarian theorizing, not least among sociologists, that takes theory seriously by demystifying it and 2) to alert those resisting totalitarianism to be on guard against the counter-revolution that lurks within our own efforts. As a matter of my opinion, this post is not a rigorous survey of the vast literature on totalitarianism.
One will not find any reference to Hannah Arendt’s work The Origins of Totalitarianism: this is not because it is not important, but because its concern is psycho-political and its preoccupation too historically specific (i.e., the 20th century, Nazi Germany and Russia). One would think from Arendt that totalitarianism is a problem of ideologies, personalities and grand politics that were alchemical components distinct to the 20th century rather than the racketeering and parasitic social enterprise over which coalitions of power blocs contend to dominate – the centralized management of human affairs – which we call the State. This is a problem – the State – ascendant and dominating at one time and in retreat at others, that emerged over 5000 years ago. Totalitarianism, thus, I contend is not a problem of the 20th Century, but the core contradiction and paradox of ‘civilization’. I do not intend this as a refutation or quarrel with Arendt. But I want to suggest that based on highly specific reading, resistance to totalitarianism might be best served by overstanding the processes effected by individuals and blocs once the State – centralized authority – is brought into being and must sustain itself, or more correctly must sustain the interests of social parasites who offer protection, for a price.
First, I sketch the ‘problem’ CoVID-induced totalitarianism in the age of legalized lawlessness. Second, I reflect on the role that theory ought to play in the resistance to totalitarianism of all forms. Third, I offer an opinion on democratic or participatory totalitarianism. Finally, before concluding, I outline what is most salient to totalitarianism – the destruction of competing associations for the allegiance of the individual.
This essay will be posted in two parts: first with the Introduction, Parts I and II, followed by Parts III, IV and the conclusion.
The ‘problem’ of (modern) totalitarianism
The prime minister of Canada openly expressed his “admiration” for China’s “basic dictatorship”. Directly or indirectly, Justin Trudeau is touched by scandal, after scandal, after scandal, after scandal, after scandal, after scandal, has perjury to his credit at the faux Emergencies Inquest. He is now tainted by the out-and-out lying, gaslighting and double-speaking that he did not force anyone to get ‘vaccinated’. Corrupt, pompous and an inveterate liar though he is in just about all things, we should take Justin Trudeau at his word on the point of admiring China’s dictatorship. It is not simply that he says the quiet part aloud; rather, his boundless hubris, greed for power and trust-funded narcissism makes him indifferent to even the pretense that he is other than a dictator very much in the mould of Shih Huang Ti – China’s first emperor. So much as Justin Trudeau a penchant for dictatorship that he is poised to give away Canada’s national sovereignty to another dictatorial regime, the Bill Gates funded (owned?) WHO and its so-called Pandemic Treaty.
Famously, not until Adolph Hitler turned the same trick, Shih Huang Ti, that impresario of centralized authority, autocracy, and, shades of Justin Trudeau’s Bill C-21 citizen disarmament skullduggery, criminalized the possession of weapons excepting his forces of predation. Through rigorous censorship of the arts, the emperor criminalized all forms of public expression and thought that did not conform to his own. Justin Trudeau is seeking to accomplish the same by rewarding the compliant corporate news media (with tax-payer dollars) and through Bill C-11, the internet censorship bill.
While Shih Huang Ti was the State personified, Justin Trudeau he is consiglieri to the cabal of WEF/bureaucratic deep state ideologues, the info-tech-unintelligence-military industrial complex, the rentier-philanthrocapitalist caste, kleptogarchs (i.e., ‘oligarchs’), politgarchs (i.e., plutocrats) and bankster and corporate predators for whom the real-life Dr. Evil, Klaus Schwab, is happily the front. Indeed, happy to lord what seems his absolute power over Canadians, Justin Trudeau relishes using the brute force of the State that his transnational handlers allow him.
What is important to comprehend is that while Justin Trudeau is an authoritarian personality through-and-through, citizens who resist tyranny must not reduce totalitarianism to the charismatic personality of the tyrant. After all, was not Adolph Hitler a devotee of Henry Ford and were not the Nazis aided and abetted by the likes of the Carnegie corporation, Henry Ford, Thomas Watson, Prescott Bush, John D. Rockefeller Jr and the Wall Street set? Such collusion is well documented by Anthony Sutton.
Equally important to comprehending totalitarianism are two other things. First, the modality for its expression is in the form of the State, whose governors always proclaim to ‘help’ by centralizing power and expanding the dead weight of a non-productive and sycophantic quasi-autonomous bureaucracy. Second, there are humanistic and post-humanistic ideas (i.e., humans can be improved, even technologically) and processes which generate dependency and unfreedom (i.e, the destruction/subordination of competing authorities and loyalties such as guilds/unions, the family and the nation through the force of persuasion and the persuasion of force – Antonio Gramsci, an authoritarian in sheep’s clothing, called this “hegemony”).
Guided by a great spiritual awakening, resistance to tyranny and conscious intent to build human and humane communities, people around the world are resisting wickedness in high and low places. Zbigniew Brzezinski, both architect and representative of national and global totalitarianism – which is in effect a nascent super-State – saw this coming and attempted to warn his fellow globalist predatory cabal and their minions in government, the private and the philanthro-capitalist sectors. From “Major foreign policy challenges for the next US President” Brzezinski tells us that:
For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. There are only a few pockets of humanity left in the remotest corners of the world that are not politically alert and engaged with the political turmoil and stirrings that are so widespread today around the world. The resulting global political activism is generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination.
So if this is the problem, what are totalitarians to do? Brzezinski answers: “To put it bluntly: in earlier times, it was easier to control one million people than to physically kill one million people; today, it is infinitely easier to kill one million people than to control one million people”. Do not mistake him, however: he is not presenting his ilk with a choice. His solution, rather, is to do both: kill and propagandize. So, what are people to do except what the awakened critical mass of individuals in Canada, the Netherlands and France and elsewhere are doing? Resist, of course, because in the totalitarian drive toward slavery there is no distance between the individual in face of imperial command and the forces of coercion. But, without a serious engagement with theory are pitfalls built into the resistance to totalitarianism?
What is the role of theory in the development of an anti-totalitarianism consciousness?
At present, I think totalitarianism is the most potent concept we have to make sense of the manic grab for absolute power by a global misrulers and their administrative minions in various State bureaucracies. The attainment of uniform dominance – both global and local, down to the cellular level of the human being as averred by Yuval Noah Hariri and Klaus Schwab – by an openly secret government cannot be undertaken without the willing capitulation of 1/3 of the propagandized populace. The CBDC digital plantation and the digitization of everything will not on its own be enough. It is not the conviction of the propagandized that will make or break the brief attainment of full-spectrum dominance before it all comes crashing down under its own weight or before the human species is wiped out in the process. It is instead, I think, that some of the 1/3 of undeciders and fence sitters who typically go along to get along will become awakened and join up with the critical mass of the 1/3 of dissenters to free humanity from the parasitic grip of one world government. But how will this happen without theory, especially an empirico-historical account of totalitarianism?
No conscious action occurs without theory. And, all theory is either action in process or a mind experiment. To be ignorant of theory guiding one’s action is to be ‘free’ from the responsibility of correction that comes with the consciousness that to avoid insanity as averred by Einstein – doing the same over and over again while expecting a different result – one must be self-conscious about theory. Why do I make such a forbidding statement on theory and what has this to do with totalitarianism?
First, we live in an anti-intellectual culture that judges theory in the sciences differently from that of the social disciplines. I do not think this is seriously debated. The result is that we are socialized to value and extol the virtues of theory in the sciences, largely because of:
- the intensive training necessary to attain highly specialized and technical ways of knowing and ‘producing’ facts
- the utility of science and technology is directed and given value by the State and corporate interests and
- because science is the most revered sect of the post ‘renaissance’ religion of secularism.
‘Science’ has come to attain its cult status, not because it is free from context and is self-determining. It is rather that, as Maurice Cornforth notes in The Theory of Knowledge, the fusion of the State, commercial and the knowledge clerisy take the “leading part in the general development of science…[and place]…definite conditions and limits upon the development of the ideas of science”. Hadron colliders and the specialized equipment of laboratories requires the wealth of the nation’s expropriated by the State to serve the State.
It is easy to dismiss the idea that science is context dependent and culture bound rather than laissez faire, dancing to the beat of its own drum. That is until one realizes, as noted by Lewis Mumford in Technics and Human Development, that “Hero of Alexandria designed a windmill to work an organ, and later, steam was generated to work an organ bellows, long before either force was used to pump out mine [or pick cotton]”. More still: the Kmtans (Egyptians) calculated the distance to the sun in the metric system which was stolen by Napoleon; the Hindus of the ancient Indus Valley calculated the mathematical weight of the atom (which is the name for an Kmtan god); the Arabs and Persians gave us our numerical system, revolutionized optics and optometry among other things; and, as Cedric Robinson reminds us in the Preface to Black Marxism, the vast technological contributions of China and pre-Indian subcontinent were pilfered by the Europeans to launch the age of European global conquest. The Kantian and Hegelian claims that ‘Asians’ are a fossilized culture wants for evidence. Indeed, not only does the history of science suffer from arrogant Eurocentrism and chronocentrism (the present is an advance on the past), the very idea that the Chinese and Japanese are stealing ‘our’ technology is none but fair turn around.
Second, in contrast to the virtue of science heroically undertaken by the long-suffering lone scientist, social theory is imagined as arid wind-blowing and the abstruse speculations of the remote professoriate. In addition, there is the general assumption that the ideas of the professional thinker, arrived at by systemic reflection, is as equally good as the haggard parent making dinner because both cannot live without thinking thoughts about social interaction. No less than the ‘great’ intellectual, ideologue of power, war criminal and arch globalist, Henry Kissinger, thought so when he argued that conflict among academics is as great as it is because of the narcissism of their petty differences.
By no means is this sort of anti-intellectualism universal. The French, as opposed to the English, for example, have long accorded intellectuals a specialized place of esteem, even popular esteem, in the culture. But the point I want to make is other than this. It is that ‘social science’ since given birth in the 19th century by founders such as August Comte, Immanuel Kant and Adolph Quetelet, all of whom were (natural) scientists by the way, imparted the ideology and appropriated mechanical, not to mention messianic, rhetoric of science. Their aim, as noted by Friedrich Hayek and Alvin Gouldner, was to legitimate the utility of social ‘science’ as a modality for technocratic social management in aid to the governing caste. Whatever latitude is granted to scientists as long as they do not reach beyond their guilded cage, this is not so the case with social ‘scientists’ propagandized by the cognitive prison of totalitarian ideology from kindergarten onward (see brief discussion on ‘public’ education as a vital modality for totalitarianism) to perpetuate the propaganda of the Kleptogarchs and their ilk.
My point is that without a sound grasp of theory, those of us consciously ‘committing sociology’ to resist totalitarianism cannot afford to treat theory carelessly. Without anti-totalitarian theory and testable hypotheses, we cannot explain the unreconstructed sociopathic scientists who are granted State-sponsored unqualified immunity, Nuremburg be damned, to develop bioweapons, mass sterilization technologies, somatic and neural control technologies at a distance, kill-bots, targeted neurocognitive-nanotech weaponry to kill without a trace and, of course, to kill or modify behaviour en masse by spiking water and food. Nor, without a theory of totalitarianism will equally sociopathic social ‘scientists’ who are the architects of mass psychological operations be explainable. A more detailed account of the relevance of 5th Generation Warfare for totalitarianism can be had with James Corbett’s “Episode 441 – Your Guide to 5th-Generation Warfare” and the documentary 5th Generation Warfare: History, Modern Context, and (Some) Solutions. All of which, needless to say, is subject to nullius inverba, “On no one’s word”.
Now before wrapping up part II of this commentary, let me make a brief detour to state that the aim of my blog is to popularize and resuscitate the quality of mind that C. Wright Mills calls the sociological imagination and to merge it with what Cedric J. Robinson calls the Black Radical Tradition. After the struggle is not one of powers and principalities, but for the geography of the mind. Thus, both modalities of thought aim to resist totalitarian control, but the latter places racial capitalism at the heart of its effort to theorize the politics of resisting social dominance. Now, recognizing it as a threat to the established order, it is for this reason that sociology and sociologists have served their master, the State, in neutering the transformative impact of the sociological imagination’s demands and procedures for autonomous assessment of truth as a guide to make sense of the interplay of individual and mass action and consciousness in shaping experience and the grand drama of reality. There is no sociology textbook that does not cynically appropriate Mills’s concept, while concealing from students that his objective was to cultivate a way of thinking that breaks sociology’s historic complicity from its founding in the 19th century with the Saint Simonians, notably Auguste Comte, to Emile Durkheim’s obsequious submission to the diktats of the State, the bourgeosie and middle class utilitarians.
In effect, as noted by Alvin Gouldner, the sociologist is a state-sponsored “partisan” engaged in what Martin Nicolaus calls “social espionage” on behalf of their patron, the State, and, increasingly, philanthro-capitalists. Much the same point has been made by Abraham Itty and Willem van Schendel in their outstanding Introduction to Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, borders, and the other side of globalization. Robinson’s Black Radical Tradition thesis shares the objectives of the sociological imagination, which is to liberate human beings from what Charles Bukowski calls “dank submission” so they may more fully and productively contribute to life without the constant superintendence of the State. But whereas Mills inexplicably avoids race – which was central to the Civil Rights Movement, the transformative effects of Cold War on US ‘race relations’, and, the Black intellectual formation of international relations – the Black Radical Tradition channels the Black experience from the instantiation of global racial capitalism as a prism to apprehend the human condition and the ‘socio-genetic imperative humans to be free’.
To be clear: while I accept Jack D. Douglas’s thesis in The Myth of the Welfare State that humans are socio-genically primed to seek freedom and liberty within the limits specified by the constraints and restraints of social interaction and interdependence, I see no fundamental contradiction in saying that this very tendency equally leads to dominating others. The great psychologists such as Freud, Jung and Rollo May pointed this out, and, indeed, the teachings of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have made this very point – there is a battle waging within each of us. It is important then to recognize that from Plato and Aristotle through to the so-called Enlightenment, the theory of liberty and freedom depended on the bad faith denial of them to the colonized, the dangerous classes and the enslaved. Liberty and freedom are not all or nothing – things are more complicated than that. As Terrence Morris reminds us in Deviance and Social Control: The Secular Heresy, “…belief in the dignity of Man is as much an act of faith as belief in the existence of God; neither is a proposition which may be put to the test by means of controlled experiment”. Interestingly, every known invasion, and especially revolution, which offered ‘safety’ and ‘security’, and, proclaimed to liberate humanity from tyranny, tightened the trap of ‘civilization’ around captive herd more securely. While just about everything written by Lewis Mumford attests to the dangers of centralized authority, much of that ‘dusty’ work is renovated by Robert Mann’s four volumes of The Sources of Social Power and James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Seeing Like a State, Weapons of the Weak and Against the Grain. Relevant to the Schwabian and Haririan totalitarian trope of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is Scott’s elaboration of the mechanism for control: “legibilization”. In the context of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ ‘welfare state’, this is the intensive cataloguing and surveillance of the population to disburse the ‘benefits of life’ (e.g., through killer ‘vaccines’), which Michel Foucault called “biopower”, or, to destroy life (e.g., through killer ‘vaccines’) by determining who get to live, under what conditions and (how many) die), which Achille MBembe calls “necropolitics”. And, coming soon, the public roll out of mind control, as noted above, which has been the wet dream of totalitarians like Plato and mad scientists like José Delgado. It seems to me that if victory over totalitarianism will not bring more of the same, then we must be open to indeterminacy and risk as a necessary condition for establishing meaning about the liberty and freedom those of us resisting totalitarianism seek.
Drawing on the sociological imagination and the Black Radical Tradition, what I want to do in this post is briefly sketch my ongoing counter-sociological reflections on the way that totalitarian-induced CoVIDianism has come to grip the minds of many, and, against which a growing and fierce backlash is growing around the world. To be clear, I do not reject psychological explanations such as that offered by Mattias Desmet’s theory of ‘mass formation psychosis’. Indeed, without taking away anything from Desmet, it is important to recognize that both Robert Nisbet’s The quest for Community (1959) and Thomas Szasz’s The manufacture of madness: A comparative study of the Inquisition and the mental health movement anticipated Desmet’s thesis. What I do suggest is that we situate psychology within social processes, inasmuch as comprehending that psychology is, socio-genically speaking, both cause and consequence of socio-symbolic interactions and ‘unthinking’ commitments to social processes that give rise to totalitarianism. And equally so, enlarging the domain of an alternative emotional modality that rests on what Robert Nisbet calls ‘voluntary associations’ which enable and promote difference and diversity is essential from the victory over tyranny collapsing in on itself to start the ratcheting-up process all over again. As noted by Jack D. Douglas in The Myth of the Welfare State, only constant vigilance and the ensurance of robust counter-weighted associations and blocs that, over time, check and prevent the absolute dominance of any one groups is the socio-genic imperative toward freedom to be lived in its fullest.
My contention is that without a sound theoretical grasp of totalitarianism, those of us resisting the looming digital slavery will make missteps in action upon which the enemies of humankind will be quick to capitalize on. For those who prefer the risks of freedom and liberate to the ‘safety’ of slavery, Alvin Gouldner’s warning in The Coming Crisis of Sociology to young Left radicals of the late 60s and early 70’s is as good now as it was then: “Radicals who believe that they can separate the task of developing theory from that of changing society are not in fact acting without a theory, but with one that is tacit and therefore unexaminable and uncorrectable. If they do not learn to use theory self-consciously, they will be used by it”.
[1] This essay is inspired and livicated to my friend’s five and two year-old daughters. Brilliant, beautiful and curious, they deserve a world where they will thrive rather than enslaved, controlled or murdered by officer-holders of a global centralized State.
[2] In their respective works on totalitarianism, there is considerable overlap between Jack D. Douglas and Robert Nisbet. Douglas, however, gives considerable attention to fiscal problems and inflationary tendencies of totalitarian/equalitarian regimes. He also emphasizes “ratchet-ups”, which is totalitarians foment crises and ‘systemic shocks’ to generate fear which scare citizens into clamour for State ‘protection’. Nisbet, for his part, emphasizes both the totalitarian political theory and practice of destroying the family and a host of voluntary associations that are the fount of human liberty.
[3] I do not intend to undertake any lengthy explanations of theory in the body of this blog. I will at this junction briefly state what I overstand theory to be. It is fundamentally an explanatory account of a phenomenon. To determine the veracity of the explanation three procedures are possible. The first is induction where one goes from the particular to formulate a general theory by inducing singular effects. Second, deduction where one goes from the general to the particular by rigorously excluding known multiple sources of causation to arrive at a singular explanatory fact. Finally, abduction or inference, which is the drawing of a conclusion as to a matter of fact from hunches and patterns derived from insecurely verified information. The latter is often called a “conspiracy theory”. But by logic, there can be no such thing – there can only be, at worst, a ‘theory of conspiracy’ or, at best, a hypothesis. Given that governments and other branches of the State and political-economic power cults thrive on secrecy and, in fact, do conspire one can hardly but speculate on the forces and machinations to be resisted.
[4] Does the elected prime minister of Canada have the constitutional authority to sign over the sovereignty of the Nation to an unelected global State organization?
[5] I do not make the argument that the 3rd century BCE first Qin emperor, after who China is named, is either an anomaly or a novel type of State-builder. The archetype of State-builders (Ashurbanipal, Hammurabi, Narmer, Sargon, Scorpion King), whose authority derives from ‘god’ they claimed, are to be found in the earliest river States of Tigris-Euphrates (e.g., Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Akkad), Kmt (i.e., Egypt) and the Indus Valley (i.e., Mohenjo Daro) from whom terms such as ‘King of Kings’, ‘Pharaoh’, ‘Satrap’ and the like derive.
[6] The real purpose of Justin Trudeau’s intent to disarm civilians has been mystified by emotional appeals to grandpa Joe and recreational hunters and subsistence hunting by First Nations, Metis and Inuit. A necessary condition for the globalist takeover of both the State and civil society is the operationalization of mobile Transnational Rapid Deployment Units and domestic jackbooted and horse-mounted troops of death rolled out to crush the 2022 citizen’s protest against the “COVID-19 mandate” ‘from heaven’). Hence, the Trudeau regime’s eugenical weaponization of the food supply through the claptrap narrative of “climate emergency” that sees the “Ministry of Environment & Climate Change Canada (ECCC)…[quietly]…building a new facility in Winnipeg that will be home to a firearms armoury, interrogation rooms, biological labs, media relations offices, “controlled quiet rooms,” and intelligence facilities”. Whereas Kung Fu resulted from the Emperor Shih Huang Ti’s clever gambit to unify the so-called Warring States, no shadow martial arts will be of any use if Trudeau achieves his aim. The result will be death to those who resist and slavery for those who choose the safety of social death. In this dystopia liberation coming about from total social collapse and/or spontaneous decentralized regeneration from this sort of barbarism.
[7] There is considerable confusion about what the State is. At times, some like Robert Higgs, surprisingly create confusion by conflating ‘government’ with the ‘State’. Ralph Miliband defines the State as composed of five interconnected ‘institutions: 1) government, 2) military to prosecute both war and defence, 3) courts (theoretically independent of government), 4) domestic coercion (prisons/police) and 5) bureaucracy and civil ‘service’. Rather than specifying its constituent parts, Andreas Pandreou in Man’s Freedom offers a descriptive account. He says the “The word ‘State’ has two connotations. One of them refers to any organized society with a distinct government…The other connotation refers to the power-house, the apparat that exercises command…The members of this apparat wield power in varying degrees. It is a special kind of power, for it is viewed as being legitimate”. But by whom? Citizens? Just try and withdraw either ‘consent’ or ‘legitimacy’? Rather, as Charles Tilly points out, ‘consent’ and ‘legitimacy’ is a nod and a wink between holders of centralized authority. While government directs and maintains the State, governors cannot govern without the support of a coalition of power blocs, though at once competing and collaborating, committed to centralization. C. Wright Mills calls this interconnected web of administrative power holders cycling between the bureaucracies of State and corporations “the power elite”. Contrary to his critics, Mills never claimed ‘the power elite’ are unified in their methods of exercising power. For his part, Andreas Papandreou calls them “structured and unstructured enclaves of power…[that]…constitute, at any one time, a ruling coalition, which may appropriately be called the establishment”. Like Mills, Papandreou points out that what unifies this coalition is its shared drive for domination and the centralization of power; thus they compete for power within the narrow orbit of maintaining the status quo. But this is not all. Papandreou astutely points out that not all power, indeed, real power is visible: “…much of the power to influence depends on the lack of visibility and publicity. In fact, there often exists an entire ‘parallel authority’ which wields the essence of power, while abandoning its formal trappings to the official authorities. The task of covering up the true network of power is itself part of the process of gaining power”. Power is, then, best exercised when it is invisible. The problem for the once invisible powers ‘that be’ (i.e., Bilderburg, Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, WEF etc) is, as David Icke somewhere noted, that ‘they have stepped out into the light and closed the door behind them’. Without mystique made possibly by secrecy, power is left with the most expensive means of social control – force! But in this moment of information access, force modulated by persuasion.
[8] Political Marxism as a project of acquiring State power is, in theory, distinct from Marx’s analytical approach to sociology. Since one cannot is a precondition for the other, they are totalitarian as a whole. Thus Cornforth the Marxist is a totalitarian-in-waiting for the day when the millenarian charismatic leader and her/his followers, the vanguard-elect, usher in the dictatorship of the masses in order to dominate the masses. In his screed against Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, Cornforth muses in The Open Philosophy and the Open Society: A reply to Dr. Karl Popper’s refutation of Marxism that “[The hoped for socialist society will] propagate beliefs corresponding to socialist interests and to oppose beliefs counter to them. And a police force must certainly be maintained strong enough to defend the social regime against attempts to disrupt or overthrow it”.
[9] In chapter 7, “Rationalism and Scientism versus Human Nature”, of The Myth of the Welfare State, Jack D. Douglas undertakes a fascinating Darwinian-like account of the interplay between nature (the genetic) and nurture (the social) and the human self-surpassing quest for liberty. In effect, the indomintability of some human beings and groups, even in the face of the most extreme forms of degradation, dehumanization and domination is a genetic fact built into the human species itself.
The Professor's Corner 