2,040 words

And who will guard the guardians? — Juvenal

During my long life, I cannot recall approaching the New Year with a greater sense of apprehension and angst. Looking back over the last several years, 2020 was a tipping point of chaos: COVID lockdowns, George Floyd riots and deification, an Alzheimer’s POTUS, adolescent mutilation as a “civil right,” Ukraine.

What next? Yeats?

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .

Many things have fallen apart — our southern border, a very big one. So, how then can one combat the fear and desperation that causes anguish and leads to despair? The answer to that question begins with the realization that the current regime’s legitimacy that is loosing “mere anarchy” upon us rests upon a vast edifice of lies. Lies are the “coin of the realm.” The ruling class’ criminality, depredations, and depravity grow and persist because the ruled continue to believe in the lies.

The first step back from despair is to refuse to believe what the regime’s spokesmen tell you is true. Always ask yourself: cui bono? Who benefits from the belief in what they say? Refusing to believe is an act of courage and independence. Don’t surrender to the social blackmail: “We won’t approve of you!” “Non-believers are not welcome here.” “You’re a racist bigot.” Believing them makes you into a fool and easy to manipulate. It takes effort not to be one. Seek out people — wise people, smart people you trust who are non-believers. Listen to what they say. Take comfort. They have taken that step before you, and will help point the way and give you confidence that you are in touch with the truth, with reality.

He is the hero, who in steadfast hope
Trusts on: despair is but the coward’s part.
— Euripides, The Madness of Hercules

Reject the popular culture; its mindless, hedonistic vulgarities and its commercial appendages that work to keep you immersed in the distortions, the mental smog, and the lies: Netflix, ESPN, CNN, FOX News, Hollywood, and the entire news-entertainment complex. Time is your most precious possession, and it is in a continuous state of diminishment. Think of that when you make choices on how to use the limited amount that remains. “Time,” as Schopenhauer reflected, “is that by virtue of which everything at every moment turns to nothing in our hands, whereby it loses all true value.”

How much of your remaining time will you devote to following sports, celebrities, and who’s up and who’s down in politics while worrying about whose opinions are important? Ask yourself, “Why should I care about the Olympics, the Emmy Awards, the Academy Awards, Hollywood blockbusters, the NFL, the NBA, March Madness, the Super Bowl, and the rest of the manufactured diversions, laden with contemporary fashion, relentlessly commercialized, increasingly infused with the propaganda of black victimization and ‘white guilt’? If they all ceased to exist tomorrow, would my life be any poorer?”

They are all part of the bread and circuses: distractions from what is being done to you, distractions from the grooming and polishing of those actively “replacing” you. They divert you from the importance of keeping your family intact, building strong friendships, and finding work that, if not done or done right, will be noticed and regretted. They also divert you, insidiously, from contact with what is real and what endures beyond the news cycle. They keep you wandering in a fog of confusion and self-doubt. Each individual who steps outside the propaganda mill of popular culture becomes one more obstacle to the ruling class’ aims; someone capable of aligning with others who resist the lies.

The Roman poet, Juvenal, an astute observer of vice, left us his withering satire of the early Roman Empire. His target was the ruling class’ rampant degeneracy and corruption:

Why tell how my heart burns hot with rage when I see the people hustled by a mob of retainers attending on one who has defrauded and debauched his ward, or on another who has been condemned by a futile verdict — for what matters infamy if the cash be kept?

Written 2,000 years ago, we read him now and his words still resonate. They sting.

For when was vice more rampant? When did the maw of avarice gape wider? When was gambling so reckless? Men come not now with purses to the hazard of the gaming table, but with a treasure-chest beside them.

Greed and flagrant dishonesty among the ancient Romans. Greed and pervasive corruption among the Americans. Vice celebrated as boundary-breaking and human progress. In pondering Juvenal’s indictment, I recalled a scene in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Michael Douglas, in his role as sleazy, corporate raider Gordon Gekko, a slick 1980s Wall Street tycoon, tells a crowd: “Greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”

The real-life Gekko was “junk bond” king Michael Milken, a racketeering maestro who made a billion dollars in four years while engaging in securities fraud. Milken spent two years in a country club of a federal prison. He paid a fine and emerged with a personal fortune (net worth as of 2022 $4 billion) intact to become a fake philanthropist[1] and obtain a presidential pardon. The characters behind the pardon compose some of the ruling class’ most reprehensible, corrupt vultures.[2] It is an American success story under the subtitle, “What matters infamy if the cash be kept?”

In reflecting upon this empire built on lies, it is also worthwhile to consider the fate of the empire of the Soviet Union — its descent from the supreme wickedness of a Stalinist terror-command state to the squalid, corrupt piece of disfunction presided over by the alcoholic Brezhnev. There are some depressing similarities in its trajectory of decline to those of the American empire. In its final days, the worker’s paradise was a crumbling mess run by cynical grifters propped up by a failed ideology that everyone only pretended to believe in. “We pretended to work; they pretended to pay us” captured the relationship between the rulers and their hapless subjects, sotted with vodka. Pretending was grease that lubricated the gears in the Soviet Union’s transactional machinery of corruption. Pretending is what more and more Americans must do to get by. This massive empire built by Stalin had devolved from terror into sleezy nepotism, a kakistocracy, a society run by the worst, the most unscrupulous of its citizens.

We, too, are now “governed” by the worst. The senile Biden in his assigned function grotesquely resembles the smiling “greeter” at the entrance to Walmart: a paid decoration, reciting his prepared lines. He is the front man for the oligarchs — defense contractors, tax-exempt NGOs, regulatory enforcers, the state security arm, Congressmen and their campaign funders, investment bankers, and the corporate enforcers of wokeism.

They are the real powers behind the façade of “our democracy.” The American guardians of the twenty-first century make the Soviet apparatchiks of the past look like amateur racketeers. Cultural Marxism — Rousseau plus Marx plus Freud — imported by German-Jewish philosophers like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse to America in the post-war period has rolled through our institutions beginning in the 1960s. Our guardians have insidiously completed the hollowing-out of the institutions, leaving only simulacra of the originals. The predatory elite govern against the interests of the people they claim to represent. Their politics are advanced by the ass-kissing fourth estate, mutilated into a vast propaganda mill. The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN, like Pravda in the now-defunct “socialist workers’ paradise,” peddle the power-holders’ fictions du jour.

How could this happen? In what kind of society does such a motley, sordid crew like Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, and John Fetterman rise to high positions of power? Good operates at a disadvantage with evil because good has rules it must follow, while evil’s only rule is that it transcends all rules. Bad people have the advantage. Gresham’s Law, the monetary principle that “bad money drives out good,” can be modified and applied as a principle of governing institutions’ moral entropy: “Bad people drive out the good ones” — or, “the evitable corruption of the elites.”

Back to Juvenal: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And who will guard the guardians?”

The guardians, under the specter of corruption, must always be a problem. The answer to Juvenal’s question repeats the same disturbing question, and it goes on like a repeating decimal to infinity. The ruling class’ guardians are inevitably tempted by the blandishments of power. The guardians can never be completely trusted.

Our current guardians? The ruled will continue to believe in them until their incompetence, corruption, and venality become impossible to ignore and destroy the legitimizing myths: “government by the people,” “government for the people,” “democracy in action, “the social contract.” The myths remain the impossible confection of “freedom, democracy, and equality” — the only obstacles being hierarchy and tradition, and more recently, “whiteness.” Nice try, comrades.

The “democracy” part is delusional, however; a euphemism for mob rule modulated by vote-pandering gangsters whose retinues resemble the “families” of mafia dons. “Every election,” as H. L. Mencken put it, “is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

The “equality” part is absurdly unworkable, because in every important human dimension nothing is more obvious than that people are unequal. Worse, “equality” as a political ideal is the engine of envy. Put into practice, it fuels disappointment and resentment because it perfidiously promises the impossibility of squaring the circle. Worst of all, those disappointed with the unequal outcome (clients) pressure the guardians (patrons) to try harder to make what can never happen, happen. The guardians respond, double down, and dismantle more of what was working and punish the resisters, the doubters. Authority and stability give way to the 3 Cs: corruption, collusion, and coercion.

The myth of “freedom” becomes the reality of dismantled boundaries, which serves the interests of the power brokers. The rules constantly and arbitrarily change in favor of the clients. The future becomes more unpredictable as the rabble that make up the client base become more lawless, volatile, and unmanageable.

Social wreckage has mounted from the lawlessness and corruption unleashed by the beltway lobbyists, government contractors, and rent-seekers. Marauding bands of crony capitalists have dismantled industry and manufacturing and impoverished the white working class while they import the replacement dregs from the Third World. Middle class, white Americans are sinking into a debt-ridden, consumerist wasteland, living on credit cards and diving into chemical and digital addictions — a mass of isolated individuals distracted from the disintegration of social cohesion by the panem et circenses — bread and circuses arranged by the ruling class. Government printing presses produce the “bread” in the form of increasingly worthless dollars. The circuses stay open 24/7, coming to you anywhere on your personal devices.

The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things — Bread and Games!
— Juvenal

The vast army of government manager-bureaucrats now devote themselves to “improving” the lives of people from whom they suck their bloated salaries. They have sicced that pack of snarling dogs on us that make up the “diversity” industry. Every aspect of life comes under the supervision of these relentlessly insatiable moralists: education, child-rearing, work, love, recreation — everything down to the words permitted to describe personal experience and people.

These corrupt, predatory guardians will fall when enough of us have stopped believing their lies. In the meantime, as truth-tellers reviled by those who loathe us, we can say, as Mussolini once said, “Molti nemici, molto onore — many enemies, much honor.”

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Notes

[1] Wikipedia: “According to Forbes, Milken has given away between 5-10% of his fortune, earning a philanthropy score of 3 out of 5. . . . In February 2013, the SEC announced that they were investigating whether Milken violated his lifetime ban from the securities industry. The investigation revolved around Milken allegedly providing investment advice through Guggenheim Partners.”

[2] Ibid.: “In June 2018, it was reported that some of president Donald Trump’s supporters and friends including, Kevin McCarthy, Rupert Murdoch, Sheldon Adelson [billionaire donor to Republicans, dual citizen of US and Israel], Elaine Chao [Mitch McConnell’s wife], and Rudy Giuliani, the onetime federal prosecutor whose criminal investigation led to Milken’s conviction, were urging the president to pardon Milken.”