Monday 6 June 2022

What is the best explanatory model for the nature of 2022 ruling class destructiveness? Greed, psychopathy, incompetence, insanity or demonic evil?

I often read secular, non-spiritual, analyses of what is going-on in the world - in particular the motivations of the global, national and large institutional leadership class; who are now Very Obviously destroying world civilization. 

Such analysts exclude - by prior assumption - what I regard as the correct answer; which is that the underlying reason for the leadership class behaving the way they do, is that they are affiliated with the supernatural beings of purposive evil who oppose God: Satan, Lucifer, demons, devils... whatever you want to call them. 

Of course, it is always possible to explain anything using any model... so long as one is not too fussy about incoherence, and is prepared to add incremental complexity to account for exceptions and contradictions. And when an 'explanation' becomes complex - it ceases to 'explain' and becomes impossible to refute...

Thus, by my criteria that the increasing harm being done to world civilization should be explicable on the basis of simple, coherent and commonsensical motives - none of the usual attributed motives stand-up. 


My list of the major attributed motives for the upper classes 'destroying society' is - greed, psychopathy, incompetence and insanity. All are partly true, but none explain large and obvious features of our situation. 


1. Greed. The ruling class are greedy - for money and power, primarily. But this does not explain why they are so aggressively - and on multiple fronts - destroying the world economy (including food and energy), trade and social cohesion. 

Active civilizational destruction can be exploited for a short time, as a type of looting; but when one is already the wealthiest, most powerful class in history it does not make sense to kill the goose that is laying you so many golden eggs. 

Active, strategic, repeated self-destruction (i.e. of their own sources of power and wealth) by the leadership class did not happen in historical civilizational collapses. Something extra is at work now. 


2. Psychopathy. Psychopaths are people who lack empathy, are selfish and short-termist, and manipulate others for their own satisfaction. 

Plenty of the ruling class are of that type - yet psychopathic rulers do the same to each other that they do to everyone else. Therefore a government of psychopaths must self-destruct with infighting. 

Further, psychopaths do not not stick to long term plans. They will always put 'me, now' above the objectives - so strategies would be abandoned whenever expedient. Whenever we observe a long term, cumulative social trend - we should recognize that this cannot be explained by psychopathy.   


3. Incompetence. Because gross incompetence among the ruling class has become so prevalent and is rapidly accelerating, it must contribute to ongoing civilizational destruction. 

But incompetence leads to errors in many directions whereas the current civilizational destruction is all due to leftward 'errors', and over several generations. 

Furthermore, there is no reason why incompetents should 'double-down' on their mistakes - even when this makes their own lives immediately harder - in the way that happens routinely nowadays. 

No: incompetence is real and worsening, but like psychopathy it is not strategic. 


4. Insanity. It seems quite common for analysts to attribute insanity to world leaders. Mostly, this is unthinking name-calling - because the attribution is combined with contradictory motives that would not coexist with insanity. 

Nonetheless, so increasingly bizarre, contradictory to common sense, obviously harmful and self-destructive are the behaviours of the leadership class, that they are often called insane: as if the individuals concerned were in the grip of false and impossible private delusions, hearing mad voices prompting weird actions, and/or experiencing disjointed and distorted thinking processes. The insane lack 'insight' into their own insanity, and are incapable of 'reality testing' their ideas - which also seems to fit. 

The transagenda is probably the strongest evidence for insanity among leaders; because such an obviously-false and destructive set of ideas has never been seen before - yet is already a worldwide, officially/ legally mandatory, mass media promoted, bureaucratically-enforced set of rules and mores; and the 'insanity' continues to increase month by month. 

But while insanity does potentially supply a measure of long-term consistency of motivation - thus of strategic, directional change - genuine and motivating insanity is not a large-scale and coherent group phenomenon, nor does it spread widely and rapidly. 

Insanity further lacks the self-promoting/ other- manipulating and other-exploiting aspects that are so prevalent in the ruling class.  


Therefore, assuming one believes in the reality of the demonic; the affiliation of the leadership class to the interests of personal, purposive, evil-beings - seems like the simplest, most common-sensical, coherent and predictively-valid of the explanatory models available. 


Note added: To summarize the above argument; it is hard to explain what is going-on on the basis of human motivations, but easy to explain it on the basis of demonic motivations (assuming one knows something about what these are). 

Indeed, the most coherent alternative 'master-hypothesis' to demonic affiliation is probably one or another version of the idea that the ruling classes are (to a greater or lesser extent) literal aliens

To attribute control to aliens has the advantage of explaining why the ruling classes are acting strategically against their own interests - and indeed against their own survival. 

To my mind; the alien hypothesis is, at root, mostly a speculative and secularized version of the reality of demons. But the main difference is that demons seek the damnation of souls; while the posited aliens seem to have attributed to them the same kind of motivations as human rulers - greed, psychopathy, incompetence, or the 'insanity-equivalent' of being alien and therefore weird.  

6 comments:

Stephen Macdonald said...

Many fine analysts have emerged on substack who challenge and refute the lies of the birdemic. The ones who have relevant credentials "The Bad Cat" in Spanish, is the soubriquet of one dissident microbiologist) do a thorough job of demolishing the sham science used to justify this great evil. Yet when it comes to *why* these crimes have been perpetrated in a global synchronous manner, they resort to the feeble "explanations" described by Dr. Charlton.

My response to them is to apply their rubric to the Holocaust, which of course they cannot as they are very shallow men despite their often very sharp intelligence. Yet even the Holocaust pales in comparison with the global orgy of destruction unfolding around us today (though the full horror has yet to manifest).

The overwhelming majority of men today are blind to the most obvious explanation for the current situation. That is, the explanation outlined here by Dr. Charlton, which is supported throughout Scripture.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Stephen - If it is correct that this is a demonically-driven destruction; then this is the only time (we know of) in the history of the world when such a thing has been led top-down on a global scale, in a world of manyfold more people than in the past, and with unprecedented degrees of interdependence.

This means that analogies with the past are misleading; and that our natural assumption that there will at least be *attempts* to ameliorate - if not reverse - the accumulating problems, will Not happen at the highest levels. Instead, many or most of those with power may well (but deniably, indirectly) be doing their best to pour petrol onto the growing-conflagration.

The recent anti-Fire Nations sanctions are an example; actually aimed at causing Western then global economic-annihilation, they were implemented under the pretense of humanitarian goals, and triggered by a conflict that has been incrementally planned, provoked and escalated by the globalist ruling class. Another indirect/ deniable destruction was the supposedly 'economic stimulus' but actually *colossal* scale money-'printing' schemes beginning a couple of years ago - which have (as intended, but upstream, deniably) triggered world-wide inflation - and the ruling-class proposed 'remedies' will add fuel to this fire.

Such evil motivations are why the 'prepper' response to the currently escalating viceral fear of Apocalypse (at least, that is what I am sensing), which I see being advocated all over the place, is some combination of futile and harmful.

Prepping is fine for local and short term survival in a society that is basically holding-together, or is gradually transitioning to a different stable equilibrium. But what has been prepared and is now beginning to manifest is (I believe) a positive-feedback crash with enormous levels of destruction and death. What we have now has been primarily self-willed and self-inflicted; and sustained by levels of apathy, denial, cowardice, and blind hedonism among the Godless masses - which is again unprecedented in history.

Of course, nothing is certain - and one might therefore assume it is best to 'play safe' and 'look after number one' - but if this truly is a spiritual phenomenon, then we need to be aware that fear is a sin, and there are worse fates than death (which is - in the end - a good thing for Christians).

So, I regard this as a challenge to faith which we can only overcome with hope located beyond life; and it is a very individual challenge such that our best guidance will not be a checklist of survival tips, but the very specific and personal guidance of 'what to do, now' by the Holy Ghost.

*That* is the spiritual essential, without which a store of physical essentials will do no good at all.

Iain M said...

I too have found the question of motivation to be one of the hardest and most puzzling features of this rapidly declining West/Civ.
It seems there are many people out there (though not nearly enough!) who just want to know 'why', why do they do this? How do they imagine they will continue to be a leaders of a people they are degrading and reducing? What or who ensures their own survival in a world in which they will still have tribal enemies but no functional tribe of their own to protect them?

How does the endgame even work for them?

The simple answer you give is the most compelling in the end.

jana gatien said...

For those who can see thaffft fh7supernatural evil is driving the destruction, chaos and insanity/inversion of civilization, the question isn't whether or not it's driven by evil. It's "what is real aim such evil is hoping to accomplish?" I don't think they want depopulation. I think they want a large, controllable, malleable, degraded and dependent population. If they wanted us dead, it would be done already. A large pop of spiritually dead is preferred and aimed for. Whats a greater victory for Satan than one choosing one's own soul oblivion? Choosing it over and over and over again. As for their purposes in having a large, dumb and dependent pop, I suspect they are grooming people for possession, as there are many many disembodied d emons hoping for vehicles thru which to facilitate sensual fulfillment. A massive pop of people with empty souls is like a hotel with many vacancies. if one's soul is not filled with spirit, it's a dark room up for grabs.

Bruce Charlton said...

@jg - I think you are probably right. And to get Men to choose their own damnation is not easy, as CS Lewis made clear to me in remarks of his Screwtape character - although it does seem to have become an easier job for the demons over the decades since CSL was writing.

Having said that - evil is heterogeneous, because there are many ways and motives for opposing God and creation; and there are certainly *some* of the ruling class who do want massive global depopulation (they keep telling us so), and are doing everything that can get away with to achieve that goal. The analogy is with Screwtape - a senior demon who is working for mass damnation, versus Wormwood (the junior) who simply enjoys causing suffering and death.

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2020/05/understanding-ahrimanic-distinction.html

Bruce Charlton said...

@AG - I don't like topical/ newsy/ media linked stuff stuff - see sidebar.