On Bannon and what could perhaps be called "Bannonism":
I got to thinking & researching a bit the other day about what takes people into a Leninist "burn it all down" way of thinking, and the best I can come up with is this:
Vertical inequality--which is to say that those with merit attain heightened status--can eventually translate to *ho…
On Bannon and what could perhaps be called "Bannonism":
I got to thinking & researching a bit the other day about what takes people into a Leninist "burn it all down" way of thinking, and the best I can come up with is this:
Vertical inequality--which is to say that those with merit attain heightened status--can eventually translate to *horizontal* inequality--but not by race, by *economic class*. If the folks who make it to the top are then able to effectively pull the economic ladder up from under them by corrupting the "meritocracy" into ensuring that even if their kids are mediocre at best, they still inherit the best schools, the best universities, the best jobs, the most financially-successful marriages, and then wash, rinse, and repeat on the next generation with their grandkids, then the system starts to look pretty rigged for anyone not upper middle class or better by marriage (there are often two post-college incomes under a single upper-middle class household or higher today). If the economy is rigged, and the school system is rigged, and the universities are rigged, and the job market is rigged, then OF COURSE people excluded from that system-rigging are going to then say that the election is rigged when their candidate loses. Everything else in the country is rigged, so why *wouldn't* the elections be rigged?
Bannon is a man who has seen the system rigged from the inside (Goldman, Navy officer corps, Hollywood, government), and has mostly benefitted from his position in that system, but he is empathetic to the (mostly non-college men) who are excluded from that rigged system and that is who he is speaking to. He sees the immorality in the economy and across national institutes, he sees the post-college liberal class being at the heart of that institutional corruption, and he sees them not doing anything to change the economic situation--in fact, they'll bitch about billionaires concentrating wealth while they're doing the same damned thing in the upper middle class tier of the economy--and as a result, he has encouraged his audience to burn down the system since those who are benefiting from it the most seem to be decadently indifferent to the people they are locking out economically. If there is no economic fairness in society, it becomes a system of exploitation, and on a long enough timeline, the people on the exploited end are going to find that all their peaceful options for changing those corrupted institutes are coming up short, and that's when they move to the more violent ones.
I'm reminded of two quotes here, one by JFK and the other by Teddy Roosevelt:
"When you make peaceful change impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable."
"Wars are often better than certain kinds of peace."
I think you're giving Bannon way, way too much credit. After all, the man scammed millions of dollars from people. He doesn't give a damn about anyone but himself. Care to make odds on how much he's got stashed in a Swiss bank account? He's got his and, like Trump, convinced gullibles that he cares about them.
"Bannon is a man who has seen the system rigged from the inside (Goldman, Navy officer corps, Hollywood, government), and has mostly benefitted from his position in that system"
Seeing a corrupt system and seeing everyone in on it getting rich makes it feel like running scams on others is fair play. If scams are legal, why not get in on the scams if you already know how it works? This is how the nihilism spreads from the decadent elite to the hedge fund managers who handle their money. They say "fuck it, I'm robbing people to make this guy richer, why not just rob people myself and take much more of the profit if the shit is going to go down either way?" This is kind of like when the Zetas branched off from the Mexican military because they realized that the government they were fighting for was already corrupted by the cartels, so why not get in on the cartel business themselves with their knowledge? It's what happens when certain elements of the scribe class or the praetorian class get tired of the decadent shit that the elites they are working for refuse to stop, and so they turn on them and get in on the same action themselves.
On Bannon and what could perhaps be called "Bannonism":
I got to thinking & researching a bit the other day about what takes people into a Leninist "burn it all down" way of thinking, and the best I can come up with is this:
Vertical inequality--which is to say that those with merit attain heightened status--can eventually translate to *horizontal* inequality--but not by race, by *economic class*. If the folks who make it to the top are then able to effectively pull the economic ladder up from under them by corrupting the "meritocracy" into ensuring that even if their kids are mediocre at best, they still inherit the best schools, the best universities, the best jobs, the most financially-successful marriages, and then wash, rinse, and repeat on the next generation with their grandkids, then the system starts to look pretty rigged for anyone not upper middle class or better by marriage (there are often two post-college incomes under a single upper-middle class household or higher today). If the economy is rigged, and the school system is rigged, and the universities are rigged, and the job market is rigged, then OF COURSE people excluded from that system-rigging are going to then say that the election is rigged when their candidate loses. Everything else in the country is rigged, so why *wouldn't* the elections be rigged?
Bannon is a man who has seen the system rigged from the inside (Goldman, Navy officer corps, Hollywood, government), and has mostly benefitted from his position in that system, but he is empathetic to the (mostly non-college men) who are excluded from that rigged system and that is who he is speaking to. He sees the immorality in the economy and across national institutes, he sees the post-college liberal class being at the heart of that institutional corruption, and he sees them not doing anything to change the economic situation--in fact, they'll bitch about billionaires concentrating wealth while they're doing the same damned thing in the upper middle class tier of the economy--and as a result, he has encouraged his audience to burn down the system since those who are benefiting from it the most seem to be decadently indifferent to the people they are locking out economically. If there is no economic fairness in society, it becomes a system of exploitation, and on a long enough timeline, the people on the exploited end are going to find that all their peaceful options for changing those corrupted institutes are coming up short, and that's when they move to the more violent ones.
I'm reminded of two quotes here, one by JFK and the other by Teddy Roosevelt:
"When you make peaceful change impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable."
"Wars are often better than certain kinds of peace."
I think you're giving Bannon way, way too much credit. After all, the man scammed millions of dollars from people. He doesn't give a damn about anyone but himself. Care to make odds on how much he's got stashed in a Swiss bank account? He's got his and, like Trump, convinced gullibles that he cares about them.
"Bannon is a man who has seen the system rigged from the inside (Goldman, Navy officer corps, Hollywood, government), and has mostly benefitted from his position in that system"
Seeing a corrupt system and seeing everyone in on it getting rich makes it feel like running scams on others is fair play. If scams are legal, why not get in on the scams if you already know how it works? This is how the nihilism spreads from the decadent elite to the hedge fund managers who handle their money. They say "fuck it, I'm robbing people to make this guy richer, why not just rob people myself and take much more of the profit if the shit is going to go down either way?" This is kind of like when the Zetas branched off from the Mexican military because they realized that the government they were fighting for was already corrupted by the cartels, so why not get in on the cartel business themselves with their knowledge? It's what happens when certain elements of the scribe class or the praetorian class get tired of the decadent shit that the elites they are working for refuse to stop, and so they turn on them and get in on the same action themselves.
I gotta learn how substack works at some point lol