*Pathocracy (n). A system of government created by a small pathological minority that takes control over a society of normal people.
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This almost sounds like an Onion headline, but I ran across a Facebook post that said that a new study by Princeton and Northwestern found that the United States government does not represent the will of the people. We are an oligarchy, it concludes.
Zounds. No shit, Sherlock!
That’s true, of course, but it’s been true from the beginning. The supposedly wise and far-seeing founders were the original oligarchs, land and slave owners. Their primary concern can be easily discerned when the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” from the Declaration became “life, liberty and property” in the Constitution.
That’s just a fact of life. It is also apparent that an oligarchy is a tolerable form of governance, maybe ranking ahead of benevolent dictatorship and behind military juntas. There is no democracy, and “republic,” a workable form of government, requires a vigilant and educated public. We ain’t got that. But the great defect of oligarchy is our inability to bring in new leaders when old ones fail. Back and forth we go, Democrat to Republican, replacing old bums with new ones, laughing and shouting about it as we go.
I despair of self-government as I travel the blogs and meet and talk with other people who are intelligent in so many ways, but politically dense and inert. They are consumed by wedge politics, horse races, personal validation and the search for moral and intellectual superiority. No way can we let them run the country. It is better just to let them imagine they do. Oligarchy is a necessary evil. True self-government is a pipe dream.
So the problem with oligarchy is that it is up in the air as to the nature of the ruling class. The British aristocracy left a blood trail wider than Hitler or Stalin, a coarse and vulgar race that was surely infested with psychopaths from early on. Perhaps they inherited the Medici strain of that illness via banking channels. Whatever it was, it found critical mass and bred and spread its wickedness. Even as they were booted from high perches in the North American colonies, they never really left.
American history is a blood trail as well, first the genocide of the native population, and then when we reached the Pacific, global imperialism. We were not an unusual breed of people by any means, but were sheltered, protected from attack by two oceans and unthreatened by peaceful people to the north and south.
We are not exceptional or unique, but rather lucky. We just got better at the game of imperialism due to our enormous natural resources and insulation.
Within these shores there has always been inbred stupidity, fanaticism, ignorance, racism and jealousy. That’s why democracy is out of the question and a republic, even with limited voting privileges, always teetered on the brink of tyranny. Our best hope was that our owning/ruling classes were a cut above. I think, to an unusually high degree, we did for a long time enjoy benevolent oligarchy, and real freedoms. We white folk could speak our minds, pursue lofty goals, self-educate, form labor unions and engage in mass resistance. We had troubles, fights, massacres, but a light shone through it all. We were a somewhat free people.
Maybe I read too much into this, as I don’t sit on a high enough perch to have a broad view of all of our history. But it appears from my years of self-education that benevolent oligarchs were squeezed out in the postwar period. Joseph McCarthy appears to have run (or been run in) a PSYOP, at once suggesting to us that communists were a significant internal threat while removing highly talented people from public service. That’s all the Kennedy’s were, frat boys, but kindly overlords. In their place came ugliness, the psychopaths and their high crimes and intrigues and shameless disregard for life and dignity.
Allen Dulles, an organizer behind the JFK assassination and a man with close ties to Hitler and his ilk, is a good example. He came to power after the war with hundreds more, many Paperclipped to our shores, and began a reign of terror forthwith. Ike meekly warned us about it, calling it the “military-industrial-intelligence complex,” dropping the third word in his farewell address. Like the beast springing forth from the belly of the man in the movie Alien, Dulles and company announced their presence in our government on 11/22/63.
It was not the first assassination in our history, of course. That’s a rather common thing, though most are done with more stealth. This one appears to have been done for deliberate shock value, in public, carefully captured on film for all to witness, a man’s brains blown out, a message to us, “We’re here. We’re in charge now.”
Such beasts are these men (a few women too, and Hillary is a nice fit) that they routinely meet and decide who among us gets to live and who will die. They have devised more ways to murder people than Angry Birds have for piggies, so that when a public official dies of a heart attack or a journalist in a car wreck or a comedian of galloping cancer, we can never be sure it was not murder. And the people who have died, even the sexually promiscuous JFK or flakey icon John Lennon, were not bad people. Quite the opposite. These are the good ones. It’s not a good time to be a good person with a high profile in the US.
All of this leads me to a man whose middle name, “Jesus,” was perhaps one of the most vile murderers in our history, a high-profile serial killer. His name was James Jesus Angleton, and he too had a prominent part of the JFK murder. These are words spoken as he suffered from cancer that would end his own life, and they struck me deeply. I thought, if only for a passing second, that redemption is indeed possible.
Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. Intelligence were liars. The better you lied, the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and I loved being in it. … Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.
I guess I will see them there soon.
These men are still with us in new bodies, our current crop of quiet killers lurking behind every public figure. They’ve so many ways to kill, by heart attack, cancer, suicide, drowning, suicide, car wrecks, suicides, accidental shootings, plane crashes large and small, real and fake, and did I mention suicide? They’ve not done it just a few times. It is not Spy vs Spy, or James Bond offing bad guys. They are killing good people, and not a hundred or a thousand, but tens of thousands. They are Murder, Inc. They have driven good people from public life, and left us with our current crop of journalists, politicians, judges, academics, historians, actors and entertainers, all alive due to mediocrity of character.
The good ones quietly exited.
Piece of Mindful 
Yet another uplifting piece of journalism.
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As Rand says, Swede, there are no contradictions. Only faulty premises.
You live in contradictions, never confronting them. I do.
Ayn would not admire you! You would not be allowed to sit at her feet smoking cigarettes. You’d be in the lower echelons of the cult.
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Where’s your solutions?
Low echelon cult members wallow in hopeless conspiratorial ooze.
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Solutions? You’re kidding, right. What grips this country has gripped other countries in history. It’s not new. The solution … collapse. Or war and destruction. Nothing last forever.
I’ve never seen any indication that you’ve ever confronted even one of your cherished assumptions. That makes you, in my book, a coward.
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Never confronted cause I was always right.
But lets talk about the Tokarski Paradox.
Governments that oppress their subjects=good. Governments that oppress other countries subjects=bad.
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Things should be made as simple as possible, but not more so. That remark is unanswerable.
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I’ve tried thinking about your supposed paradox, and all I can come up with is that you are such a low-information citizen that it is impossible to deal with you. You know nothing of your own government, at least it’s national security apparatuses, which I’ve explained to some degree here, and even less about the countries that your government attacks.
This is the constant brick wall I face with you, your lack of information. Your world view [sic] is topsy-turvy, and you revel in your ignorance. You’ve demonstrated over the Years a Limbaugh-level grasp of places like Venezuela, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, barely a kernel of knowledge on which you rest far-flung assumptions.
Best I can do about that supposed paradox.
If you were to confront one little ‘fact’ in your belief system, turn over one little leaf, your world would collapse. try this one little fact: The Syrian election was judged to be fair and representative by international observers. Don’t dismiss it or minimize it. Study it. Find out more, find out why they reached this conclusion. Don’t go running to your candy-ass sources you know you’ll agree with. Think critically, decide what is true, or mostly true.
Got it in you? Didn’t think so. And that’s just one little thing, one little factoid that doesn’t fit in your world view [sic]. I could give you a thousand more. Easy.
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I could care less about about whether or not we oppress others. I do care about what governments do to their own.
Historically, far more people are oppressed, murdered, starved, raped, jailed by their own than those outside their borders.
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Your first sentence answers my curiosity. You’re not a good thinker. If you don’t think good, you should not try to think too much.
Your second sentence makes no fucking sense unless you can place the events that you generally make reference to. Outside whose borders? Think, Swede, think!
This will fry you:
That’s the kind of guy the US likes to demonize in its propaganda system, and then murder, cold blood, as they did, these people you fucking admire, bloody murderers all.
[Hillary cackled when she saw he died. She’s one of you, I swear. She’s one of you. A thug in drag.]
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It’s always our fault, right Mark? We send aid to Israel and its evil, we send aid to the Palis and it’s not enough. We refuse to do business with commies and we’re blamed for their failing economies, we free trade with others and you squeal at that. Our foreign influence is measured in dollars and yet the ones taking the bribes are blameless along with those would elect or keep those money grubbers in power. Every conflict in the world is our fault.
Give me a f’ing break.
As to my last sentence Germany elected Hitler, Russia Stalin, Cambodia Pol Pot, China Mao, Norks Kim, the list goes on and on. The non-elections is some of the aforementioned countries could have been resolved by revolution.
You reap what you sow.
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You don’t read enough, and are a pawn to US propaganda, buying in to every con job. We finance Israel’s aggression. We back tyrants. We attack peaceful countries. As MLK said, the United States is the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet. Since we now have a jury verdict that the US government murdered him too, his words carry weight. his words are demonstrably true, can be shown by hard evidence, none of which is known to you. You’re in the fog of US propaganda.
US/British factions backed the rise of Hitler. They wanted Barbarossa. Stalin, an excellent leader, confounded them at Stalingrad (where he enjoyed the support of the FDR faction). Other US factions, including the Brown/Harriman banking sector (Bush) were ready to make nicey with Hitler after he conquered Russia. there would have been no D Day. Pol Pot rose out of the ashes of US bombing of Cambodia, and was supported by the US, who sent arms to him via China. Mao and the communists raised millions out of abject poverty in China even as millions starved in India under British rule.
You just don’t know shit, Swede, and continue to prove it.
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http://www.alternet.org/world/noam-chomsky-americas-sledgehammer-worldview-destroys-countless-lives-and-future-generations
Here Swede, read this.
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Yep, we could have solved the GW Bush “selection” with revolution, too. But we know where that would get us…
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4 terms of Obama?
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That is what we got … You know that then?
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“…collapse. Or war and destruction. Nothing lasts forever.”
In 2009, I stood on the ruins of Ani, a once-great city on the Turkey-Armenia border, thinking those same thoughts. How would it end for the U.S.? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ani#mediaviewer/File:20110419_Ani_North_Walls_Turkey_Panorama.jpg
Unlike most great cities, rebuilt to hide the worst of times, it was left in rubble. Even the Russians have moved back across the river leaving it to Turkey — you could see one of their guard towers from the site in the distance.
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How’s the weather out there on Jupiter?
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not bad: uranus?
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Should have seen that coming.
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Interesting new word and more relevant than ever I’d say (was looking for another post but searching POM is a nightmare).
Or maybe we have devolved into a Pathecracy, pathetic and Pathé cinemas = pathos
Did Uncle Schwab come up with this definition? It fits the Corona Coma amazingly well?!
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