I need not write yet another article on the idiocy behind the felling of statues – enough have been written, and more will come. Collaboration with lawlessness is more serious. Every age has outbreaks of ochlocracy; the rule of the mob, but authorities in league with the rioters? That is a modern disease, and it is deadly to democracy and to society itself.
Riots happen, and mob come together for the release it gives them, whatever the excuse. In past centuries it might be a section of the rootless poor with nothing to lose (hated by most of their fellows, who understand the need for order). Now we have rootless middle-class thugs, with one idea, if that, in the heads, and hatred spewing from every pore. This was the same contingent who burned Paris in ’68, but in 1968 the authorities and the respectable media were on the side of law and order: today as often the rioters have confederates in office.
With a small state, there is control over who is entrusted with power. The modern sprawling bureaucracies are a playground for activists with agendas. There is no conspiracy – there does not have to be – it just needs lots of seemingly innocuous positions to be filled by the sort of people who want the power they bring, to use for their own purposes, and for appointment panels to be staffed by cultural Marxists or those who are frightened to oppose the cultural Marxists. In this way the mindless, nihilist Marxists on the streets can know that there is no will to fight them. They have not won public opinion nor can they ever win an election, but they have power which bypasses democracy.
The Long March Through The Institutions has succeeded, in spite of the public will, in spite of democracy, and it is entrenching itself. The rioters are irrelevant really but provide a focus and an excuse for their collaborators in office to do what they wanted to do anyway. They are the ochlocrats.
(If I sound angry; I am. To hear my mother in law cowering in terror in her quiet country town, which has few policemen if any, because a mob of urban, white students have descended upon the town to take over the streets, scream their hatred and destroy the town’s soul, and nothing is done to oppose them – I am angry.)
For the woke thugs, the idea of personal autonomy must feel liberating, and the belief of utter rightness relieves one of the discomfort of having to think, while providing an internal justification for rebellion. It is not modern though: Hobbes, who had been through the Civil War described exactly that as one of the fatal diseases of a commonwealth:
To which may be added, the Liberty of Disputing against absolute Power, by pretenders to Politicall Prudence; which though bred for the most part in the Lees of the people; yet animated by False Doctrines, are perpetually medling with the Fundamentall Lawes, to the molestation of the Common-wealth; like the little Wormes, which Physicians call Ascarides.
We may further adde, the insatiable appetite, or Bulimia, of enlarging Dominion; with the incurable Wounds thereby many times received from the enemy; And the Wens, of ununited conquests, which are many times a burthen, and with lesse danger lost, than kept; As also the Lethargy of Ease, and Consumption of Riot and Vain Expence.
The disease of the state in having these ochlocrats in power will prove fatal unless drastic action is taken. It need not be what Franco did, however tempting that may be in the restless small hours, but tumbling as many as can be found out of office is needed. Make Joseph McCarthy look timid and slow.
Remember too that many of these dull officials doing the rioters’ bidding act that way not because they are fellow-travellers, but out of fear. Lift that fear then: burst open the Overton window, sack the ranks of driven ‘diversity officers’. Search the lists of daft ‘woke’ decisions, track them to their sources and hurl the guilty parties out. For those who try to get their fellow workers sacked for dissent, discipline and dismiss. (Let them find jobs in the commercial sector like the rest of us, where they might learn something of reality.) Lift the fear and allow honest decision-makers to shine and to do their duty.
One immediate thing can be done though: end the lockdown at once. It has already been ended by the crowds on the street, which has undone months of work. During the lockdown, the world is weird and nothing is normal. The structure of life is gone. It encourages the thought that anything might happen, and it might. Testosterone-filled youth are growing listless, bursting for action. Normality will begin to calm it down, just as routines soothe madness. We desperately need normality.
If the Government, those who are meant to be in charge, do not do this, do not take back control, then they are resigning their own authority to the ochlocrats. They should remember the dire warning Hobbes gave against assuming that the name of government means anything when it ceases to be real:
The Obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished. The Soveraignty is the Soule of the Common-wealth; which once departed from the Body, the members doe no more receive their motion from it. The end of Obedience is Protection; which, wheresoever a man seeth it, either in his own, or in anothers sword, Nature applyeth his obedience to it, and his endeavour to maintaine it. And though Soveraignty, in the intention of them that make it, be immortall; yet is it in its own nature, not only subject to violent death, by forreign war; but also through the ignorance, and passions of men, it hath in it, from the very institution, many seeds of a naturall mortality, by Intestine Discord
See also
- The Long March: conspiracy or accident?
- The Noble Savage, Caliban, and Hobbes
- The broken fence
- Quarrel of a dying empire poisoning modernity
- Of the natural Condition of Mankind as concerning their Felicity and Misery
- In fear of Jahannam
Books
- By Thomas Hobbes:
- By Anthony Burgess:
- By H G Wells:
- By Aldous Huxley:
- By George Orwell:
- By Jordan Peterson:
