I caught the headline that yet another effective leader of dissent against The System has been neutralised (Nigel Farage of UKIP - the man who is credited/ blamed by the mass media for getting the EU referendum which led to the Brexit vote).
This is something that The System has learned from the 1960s counter-culture dissent; dissenting movements depend on their leaders, and leaders can be corrupted and co-opted.
This is especially easy when the leaders are Not religious - as all modern leaders (including/ especially of mainstream Christian churches) are Not-religious; because their principles are unrooted, based on personal expediency and pseudo-calculated utilitarian considerations; and therefore their view will always shift over time; and this shift can be induced toward The System in response to bribery/ subsidy, and propaganda/ perception-control...
Pressure, threats and coercion of leaders is also possible, and effective; but seldom required (except in an emergency) - and a leader who has been gradually corrupted into obedience (for what they suppose to be 'good reasons') is more useful to The System (e.g. functioning as a Fifth Columnist, an infiltrator, a subverter) than one who has been terrified into obedience.
All modern leader with significant influence over important groups are now on the side of The System. There aren't any exceptions (at least, not in the UK). If we think there are exceptions, we are very-probably wrong - if not now, then soon.
Anyway, unless change happens very rapidly and completely; leaders will be corrupted and turned. We know this, and ought to expect it; and we ought to work from the implications.
But it seems that not many people yet do; and almost everybody still expects to be led to a better world.
Until that expectation stops; the prospect seems certain to be worse than the present, and much worse than it needs to be.
4 comments:
This is a fundamental weakness of all dissident movements in the West. We have seen that leaderless movements ("open-source warfare"), in the mold of Gamergate and the current Paris riots, can sidestep the System's attempts to corrupt and co-opt individuals, and thereby win symbolic victories and extract concessions.
It may be worth pondering whether leaderless movements can be developed to the point of being able to build things, execute complex policies, govern countries or institutions - and perhaps, ultimately to replace the System, rather than just frustrating and disrupting it.
@HS - Well, of course - such things can't 'be developed' except one person at a time - they would have to 'just happen' due to a lot of individual people reaching the same decision/ taking the same action - and then the only thing we could control is our personal reaction to them, and what we personally would do about it.
I can't think of any historical examples where leaderless movements were able to attain anything complex... but then, if there Had been, we would probably not recognise it. What there has been, is change sweeping across societies - change that later gets explained as due to something-or-other; but probably wasn't.
For example, the end of the feudal system and serfdom and the Middle Ages in England seems to have begun (according to some people, although probably only a tiny minority) with the Black Death (for some unknown - or 'random' reason) killing half the population, then causing a doubling of standard of living and empowering the peasants due to labour shortage. But at the time, hardly anybody seems to have realised that this was happening, or had happened - or why.
Indeed, there was a mass and essentially leaderless uprising (the Peasant's Revolt) But this happened after the population reduction, and after the peasant's material condition had begun to improve; and this revolution was rapidly and wholly defeated by the King's forces.
But the change happened anyway. Preusumably (? by modern understanding) the cause was innumerable personal economic interactions between Lords (or Employers) and Peasants, in which the surviving peasants were overall advantaged by their shortage.
But how would something like this happen if there were instead spiritual (not material) causes and outcomes, or changes in people's consciousness or aspirations?
Change would sweep through the population, unplanned, unrecorded, person by person - but not necessarily by people in contact, and with perhaps a large period of overlap between theose who changed and those who had not - and the change never actually being complete...
Individuals would know that they themselves had changed, had made certain choices that were aligned with the choices of others; but might never know what was happening overall, or why.
At the moment, almost all of our social understanding comes down to us from the perspective of those who are trying to make society into a totalising global bureaucracy (and the System factions who are fighting over control of that bureaucracy - eg. the so called mainstream-political 'left' and 'right') - and They perceive all kinds of conspiracies and leaders... that We know aren't really there... or maybe they are simply pretending as a excuse for further control?
We don't really know what they really think.
Nor do we need to, because we know - from our actual lived experience - what they want and aim at: and what they want us to want and are herding us towards.
All that has to happen is that people have to Not Want That, and want it enough; and act accordingly in their own corner of the whole; and then we would Have a mass leaderless movement starting to grow.
Ultimately, we have to understand and accept that "civilization" and "the System" (bureaucracy/Marxism/materialism/etc.) are not two different things such that there is any even theoretically sound possibility of rescuing one from the other. They are both integral parts of an organic whole.
When we speak of a bad man, we don't act as if we can cut off the bad part (his head) and thus save the rest of his body. His head, however bad, is part of an organic whole. Cutting apart (or shooting) his perfectly good body to destroy his bad head is quite frequently what we do because it is just as practical as cutting off (or shooting) his bad head (it's called aiming for the center mass, certainly not the only criterion of tactical effectiveness but an historically important one).
The bureaucracy is the civilization now. Oh, sure, there is more to civilization than bureaucracy, but destroying the bureaucracy would destroy civilization. Conversely, the inevitable destruction of civilization will destroy the bureaucracy.
And the bureaucracy is destroying civilization, and has reached the point where the process cannot be reversed. Because the people generally are bureaucrats, at least in affinity and loyalty, and often in practice as well.
Only a drastic crash in population resulting from the actual deaths of all those inclined to bureaucracy can allow the reestablishment of civilization without the corrupting madness. One can grieve for that.
I certainly did, I still do occasionally.
But ultimately one must accept it. That is the point of grieving.
@Bruce Charlton,
Thank you very much for the detailed reply. I agree entirely.
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