Homo Credulus
Is there any idea so ridiculous that modern man won't die defending it?
Joel Bowman, reckoning today from Washington D.C. ...
We’ve come to the belly of the beast, Dear Reader... the seat of deceit... the murky depths of the undrained swamp.
It’s the latest stop on our Great American Comeback(?) Tour, a wholly unscientific, entirely anecdotal exercise, in which we take the pulse of America’s real economy, one taxicab conversation... one laundromat powwow... one greasy spoon confabulation at a time.
“The nation’s capital,” as misty-eyed news anchors and spellbound grade school teachers refer to it, is a special kind of district, full of grifters and hustlers, chiselers and gangsters (the latter attired in suits as well as hoods).
Everyone is here to “effect change”... to “make a difference”... mostly in his or her own favor.
Behind us at dinner last night, at a cozy neighborhood bistro here in Georgetown, your stereotypical power couple sat down to solve the world’s problems. He/Him, all pocket square and tortoiseshell. She/Her, pompadour and pearls.
“I ask myself, where can I add value?” pondered She/Her. “How can I make maximum impact?”
“You know what I tell myself?” replied He/Him. “This is how I do it. This is what I can bring to the table. And when I look around, I know I’m in the right organization.”
Ever notice how often those who claim to serve others refer to themselves? Many of the most selfish acts in history were perpetrated by those claiming to act on another’s behalf.
And yet, this whole town is founded on that very idea: a small group of “leaders,” or “insiders,” claiming to know what’s best for everyone else, the “outsiders,” collectively referred to, down the proverbial nose, as “the people.”
Each and every day, lobbyists collude with lawmakers to direct money neither of them earned to projects both of them profit from. They’re doing it right now, as we type this very sentence, doling out favors and pork-barrelling earmarks in President Biden’s latest $3.5 trillion - wait, scratch that - $4.1 trillion spending bonanza.
What’s more, they’re proud to do the “work”! Here’s USA Today...
After a lengthy meeting among Democrats on the Senate’s Budget Committee, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York announced the agreement for a budget reconciliation package that would fund what Biden has called "human infrastructure."
Schumer said that when including $600 billion in new spending Biden has proposed in a separate bipartisan infrastructure plan, the amount of new spending comes in around $4.1 trillion – close to Biden’s full infrastructure and family agendas.
“Every major program that President Biden has asked us for is funded in a robust way,” Schumer said.
It’s easy to be generous when someone else (“the people”) signs the check. Ah, but what’s in the “plan,” you wonder? Ha! What’s not?
Continues the paper...
Proposals include expanded caregiving for the disabled and elderly, universal prekindergarten, subsidized child care, free community college, national paid family leave and extended child tax credits. There's also an assortment of environmental initiatives, led by a new clean energy standard forcing power companies to gradually shift from emitting carbon monoxide and incentives for clean energy such as wind and power.
And therein lies the greatest conceit of them all; that we can all live at everyone else’s expense, forever and ever, amen. Like the ouroboros, the mythological serpent that sustains itself by feasting on its own tail, the logic here is circular, to say the least. Federal spending that “goes around” ends up “coming around” as inflation, sooner or later. A trillion on “tax credits” here, a trillion on “clean energy initiatives” there... and pretty soon it’s six bucks a shuck at the raw bar!
As mentioned in this space last week, Consumer Price Inflation (5.4%) is the highest it’s been in over a decade. Producer Price Inflation - which will come down the pike next - is higher still (7.3%). And that’s according to the government’s own scales, Procrustean as they are.
That we should repeat the mistakes of the past goes without saying. Repetition, after all, is nothing new, as we observe in this week’s feature column, below.
But first, while we’re on the subject of man and his doomed empires, a special announcement...
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As will the Hoover Institution’s military historian and senior political analyst, Victor Davis Hanson...
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To secure your spot (and wine!), or to view the entire speaker lineup, simply click on the image below...
And now, to today’s column...
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Homo Credulus
By Joel Bowman
Man: He’ll go along with just about anything.
Given the right circumstances… a little programming… and enough time for it all to marinate in his soft, mammalian brain… there is almost nothing Homo Credulus will not learn to embrace.
Don’t believe us?
Take a look at the historical record; you’ll soon wonder how we ever got this far.
Sure, you’ll discover gizmos and flying contraptions… art and agriculture… music and mathematics. You’ll witness spectacular scientific breakthroughs, the number “0” and a man’s footprint on the moon. You’ll also find automobiles with so many cup holders, you won’t know where to holster your oversized 7/11 Big Gulp.
But you’ll also scratch your head. Perhaps you’ll even weep. And if you think hard enough, you’ll put a few things to serious question…
“Central banks?” “Modern democracy?” “The Ellen DeGeneres Show?”
How has mankind survived such atrocities? Self inflicted, no less! And why, moreover, does he rush so earnestly to repeat and replay his worst mistakes? (Ellen has been on air since 2003!)
Don’t be too hard on yourself, Dear Reader. After all, repetition is nothing new…
You’ll recall that it was the Greeks who first gave the world democracy – from the Greek, dēmokratía, literally “Rule by 'People'”. (And yes, it was those very same Greeks who put their own beloved Socrates to death… by a majority vote of 361-140.)
Today, democracy is a cherished tenet of “the West.” It is woven into the civic religion, sewn into the social fabric. Men march off eagerly to fight for it, to proselytize it … and to die in forgotten ditches defending it.
At least, that’s what they believe they’re doing. As usual, the poor saps have been duped. Herewith, a little historical context…
The phrase “Making the world safe for democracy” was actually a marketing slogan, coined back in the 1910s, as a way to sell “The Great War” to America. Weary from their own disastrous Civil War just a few decades earlier, in which hundreds of thousands of (mostly) young men gave up the ghost, Americans were mostly inward looking at the time. That is to say, they wanted little to do with what they largely saw as a “European affair.”
Polls might have indicated no appetite for battle… but the nation’s politicians were nonetheless starved for military misadventure. They sensed big profits abroad, both in manufacturing armaments and making onerous bank loans to foreign lands. Sure, “the nation” would have to fill tank and trench with warm young bodies… but very few soldiers would carry senatorial surnames along with their rifles.
And so, after a public relations campaign of truly epic proportions, America marched off to war… wrapped in the delusion they had freshly been sold.
Eddie Bernays, the man who coined the phrase and, thus, peddled the war to America, made a fortune for his efforts. He was even invited by Woodrow Wilson to attend the Paris Peace Conference, in 1919, as a show of gratitude for his services.
There, Bernays learned the full impact of his “democracy” slogan. An obviously bright fellow, the surreal experience caused him to think…
If people will line up to kill one another under the influence of a mere marketing campaign… they could surely be convinced to do, say and buy just about anything!
Bernays was right. In fact, he wrote a series of books, detailing his insights. They included Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), A Public Relations Counsel (1927) and a neat little number titled Propaganda (1928), in which Bernays laid out the blueprint for mass social and psychological manipulation.
The collected works went on to become a huge success… and the favorite of none other than Joseph Goebbles, Reich Minister for Propaganda in Nazi Germany between 1933-45.
Bernays himself, writing in his 1965 autobiography, recalls a dinner at home in 1933 where…
Karl von Wiegand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, an old hand at interpreting Europe and just returned from Germany, was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Wiegand his propaganda library, the best Wiegand had ever seen. Goebbels, said Wiegand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. [...] Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign.
It is indeed chilling to think of such a heinous undertaking as being engineered, blueprinted, premeditated and carried out according to some kind of script. And yet, there it is… in Bernays’ own words, the “Father of Propaganda.”
Having acquired somewhat of a tainted reputation-by-association, propaganda, itself, underwent a “strategic rebranding” after WWII. But make no mistake, the very same métier thrives to this day, under the more socially palatable designation, “Public Relations.”
Still, a ruse by any other name…
“Could we be so stupid again?” wonders the gentle reader. “Might the mob still be swayed by what Charles Mackay termed ‘extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds?’”
Why, of course! That’s the nature of the mob!
Whether in love, finance, politics or any other matter, man is wont to be convinced, assured, persuaded, often against his own best interests. Few are the absurdities in which he will not take refuge, invest his hard-earned capital or squander his morality.
All he needs is a good story, something to arrest his imagination and cauterize his capacity for reason. A distraction from his lonely, quotidian existence.
That, and a few crumbs to pass his lips.
The Roman poet, Juvenal, recognized as much when he mocked the panem et circenses (bread and circuses) stratagem almost two millennia ago. In his Satire X, he referred to the Annona (a kind of grain dole) and the famous circus games, held in the Colosseum and elsewhere, as designed to keep the unthinking population fed and happy.
Look around you today, Dear Reader. What do you see, two millennia later, in the Year of Their Lord, 2021 AD?
The Olympic Games are set to begin this weekend... and the stimmy checks are in the mail. We’ve got stadium sports matches… food stamp programs… snap lockdowns... mask mandates... the pretense of safety and security... and of course, the greatest bread and circuses show ever: modern representative democracy.
Now, as then, the show goes on!
Until next week...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. Remember to check out Classical Wisdom’s virtual symposium, The End of Empire and Fall of Nations. World class speakers. Timeless ideas. And, if all that wasn’t enough, wine. Early bird tickets on sale now.