From the New Criterion, “Lying For the Truth” (Nov 1993):
The thirst for moral justification for one’s life in the world is one of our deepest needs, one of our most powerful and essentially human drives, ignored at our cost and peril. In his “Innocents’ Clubs,†Münzenberg provided two generations of people on the left with what we might call the forum of righteousness. More perhaps than any other person of his era, he developed what may well be the leading moral illusion of the twentieth century: the notion that in the modern age the principal arena of the moral life, the true realm of good and evil, is politics. He was the unseen organizer of that variety of politics, indispensable to the adversary culture, which we might call Righteousness Politics. “Innocents’ Clubsâ€Â: The very phrase suggests how the political issues Münzenberg manipulated came for many to serve as a substitute for religious belief. He offered everyone, anyone, a role in the search for justice in our century. By defining guilt, he offered his followers innocence, and they seized upon it by the millions.
Except that in this forum, high, serious, honorable moral commitments found themselves joined, covertly, to profoundly sinister events. Münzenberg served Stalinism with every resource of propaganda and invented more, from the protest march to the mock-trial to the politicized writers’ congress to the politicized arts festival to the celebrity letterhead to the ad hoc committee for causes numberless.
[thanks to ahem]
From Slate, “Why do they hate us?”:
What al-Qaida does lay out, however, are grievancesâ€â€many, many grievances. There is the usual litany of complaints about the suffering of Palestinians, the tyranny of Arab regimes, and the American occupation of Iraq. But again, legitimate as these complaints may be, there is in these writings an almost total lack of interest in providing any specific solution or policy to address them. Indeed, al-Qaida’s many grievances against the West are so heterogeneous, so mind-bogglingly unfocused, that they must be recognized less as grievances per se, than as popular causes to rally around. There are protests about the United Nations’ rejection of Zimbabwe’s elections, the Bush administration’s unwillingness to sign up to the International Criminal Court, and America’s role in global warming. (To quote Bin Laden: “You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases, more than any other country. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.”) Zawahiri’s many complaints include the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, which he calls “a historical embarrassment to America and its values,” as well as the United Kingdom’s anti-terrorism laws, which “contradict the most basic principles of fair trial.” There is even a screed against America’s campaign-finance laws, which, according to Bin Laden, currently favor “the rich and wealthy, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts.”
[thanks, Bill INDC]
Presented without comment — though I hope that you all will provide some commentary.
Consider it a mid-term exam, if you’d like. In a class on “The Structural Realities of the Progressive Moment.”
Open book, of course.
Ready? Pick your pencils up…now.
Grievance radicalism as a method to obtain tyrannical power for one and one’s peers, otherwise known as poli sci 101 on the campus of any University in the country. Or one could call it the Church of the Eternal Che as worshipped through his chief priest, Fidel. Either description fits well enough.
Damn! Point broke off. I’ll be right back.
*mechanical pencil shatters*
Guess I’ll just have to use my pointy head for this one…
What I like about this, is it kind of supports one of my theories, that being that a lot of what is political – activism and so forth – is a stand in for religious activity. Specifically two things. One: to minister. That is, to freely give your time with no return for the betterment of others. Two: to be ministered to. That is, to freely receive some kind of service, whether it be food, drink, comforting, aid or so forth.
I think it clinches the circle of these two religious impulses to say, One, through activism the leftist feels he is ministering to the society by making things better – no direct return – and Two, by supporting leftist groupthink and believing the right things he is ministered to. His guilt is assuaged, he has friends, and he has purpose.
And there are always those with dead consciences in the back willing to run the show for their own gain. The reason why leftists think religion is like this is because their religion is like this.
Was that good enough for Q. 1, prof?
This is off topic, but I know people here will like this analysis of the FISA issue that ran as an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times today.
This is open book, right?
I understood there would be no logic…
SB: plans Vienna
Zum Befel!
Danny Pearl, 3000 little Eichmanns, 52 British and 191 Spanish subway riders were unavailable for comment.
I didn’t know that Glenn Greenwald was a speechwriter for Al Qaida
I hate pop quizzes, especially when they are essay questions. Anyway, I’ll choose “d) None of the Above”
Political Science. The very term verily lies.
Wasn’t Michael Lerner all about recasting grievances as values through a “politics of meaning”? Hillary thought that was cool but then people started reading Lerner’s book and so then she was like “ok, well, nevermind.” I might look at this later but it’s imperative that I do something stupid asap.
Mojo, what are your plans for Vienna, do I need to leave or lay in provisions? What instructions do I need to follow.
TW: single therapy – It will probably take more than a single therapy session to counteract all the worry about what Mojo is going to do to my town.
OMG the TW generator is giving you away Mojo, my new words are Mexico second. The plot thickens, it’s a conspiracy.
they must be recognized less as grievances per se, than as popular causes to rally around
Ok it’s not like a politics of meaning thing at all that’s a domestic correlative to “grievances as popular causes”. Or a politics of hope thing. Or a bridge to the 21st century thing. I get here because I can’t get make any of this work with the left’s Katrina narrative. I think domestically, it’s all about the grievances baby. And how George Bush hates black people. These people want to skip happy perlocutive talk (am I using that right?) – they really seem to feel, if not think, that they are one meme away from the one that will spark the Revolution. Our overseas friends seem to take a much longer view. Our left, not so much. This leads to behaviour like those people that are always holding all their scrabble tiles back waiting to get the extra z so they can put zyzygy or some shit on a little red square. Until they make their big transcendent play, it’s all about stoking the grievances.
It fascinates me.
For all the left screams about “social justice,” gay’s/women’s/black’s or [insert greivance group here] “rights,” environmental destruction, alleged disenfranchisement, unions…well, you know the rest, they appear to be not the slightest bit nonplussed that sworn, vocal enemies of this country mouth the exact same tropes.
Witness the silence from this pious collective over “honor killings,” stonings, killing gays, treating women as chattel, murdering artists/film-makers, imprisoning dissenters, stomping free expression, slaughtering innocents, mutilating female children, torturing humans and animals, setting oil fields on fire, ad nauseum e infinitum.
The cognitive dissonance amazes and astounds and depresses.
Being shameless yourselves, O Progressives, use the good-nature of the greater society by invoking shame through accusing it of crimes great and small, real and imagined, to gain ascendency over it and thus direct it to correct behavior which will, of course never ever be enough to remove the stain of the horrendus crimes that you have laid at the greater society’s feet.
(And don’t be surprised when others steal your act.)
TW: Cuchulain flowers. I did not know that.
Al Qaida knows who their friends are, that’s for sure.
the silence…
seems like it’s mostly just a matter of suppressing the inconvenient bits that don’t fit the narrative of the revolution. I’d venture, when you look at what you’ve adduced alongside the anti-trade, anti-globalization bits that is a big part of the “exact same tropes,” what you are looking at is a recasting of isolationism, where the UN and pals are actually prophylactics that can be looked at to mediate amongst cultures so that all that silenced stuff can be forever bracketed.
Left: We have the moral high ground!
Everyone else: Based on what morality?
Left: That it’s the high ground and we have it. Facist!
Wash, rinse, repeat
…the inconvenient bits that don’t fit the narrative of the revolution.
Exactly.
Another famous reformulation of this involved broken eggs and an omelette. To which Orwell was said to have asked (quite reasonably), “But where is the omelette?”
a lot of what is political – activism and so forth – is a stand in for religious activity
There are cases and causes where this is obviously true, and people and ideas it’s strategically useful to say it about, but it’s a weak formulation.
The traditions of forced conversion, worldly conquest, evangelizing and anathematizing, heresy and apostasy, in Christianity and Islam (and a few other, less successful religions), that are politics-analogous — that are politics pretending to be religion, really — aren’t traditions in every religion, and there are kinds of politics that (in theory) don’t do those things. Leninism can be well-understood as a degenerated Christianity (in the actual “God is dead” way that Nietzsche was talking about), but anarcho-capitalism can’t.
It seems like there’s a higher-order whatever that (almost all) politics and (an unfortunate hell of a lot of) religion are both variants of, that looks like Darwinist “group selection.” That can explain the unphilosophical weirdness and eternal return of political antisemitism, the incoherence of the various status-ideologies that make up Anglo-American leftism, and the tendency of political movements to turn genocidal as soon as they get a chance. And those things need explaining.
Al Gore doesn’t. He’s just a less intellectual Jimmy Swaggart. With gunmen.
Yes, redefine reality as it pleases.
That’s how you ‘keep it real’, man.
TW: Alexandra Auschutz?
The points made in this thread are demonstrated with just breathtaking accuracy (and audacity) whenever the Leftards talk about Global Warming (soon to become “Climate Change”). Ace of Spades had a great piece on this earlier today (all of Ace’s writings are great).
TW: &c., beneficent
This is is DEFINITELY just messing with me.
The traditions of forced conversion, worldly conquest, evangelizing and anathematizing, heresy and apostasy…  that are politics pretending to be religion, really  aren’t traditions in every religion, and there are kinds of politics that (in theory) don’t do those things.
“Those things” aren’t religion, and you can argue that they’re not really politics, either. They’re nothing less than old-fashioned power-lust and coercion. They get caught up with religion and politics frequently because people are susceptible to abusing power whenever they think they can get away with it, and people are almost always involved in religion and/or politics.
By defining guilt, he offered his followers innocence, and they seized upon it by the millions.
Cheap salvation is the oldest temptation in the book. If all you have to do is exert force on the outside world to achieve salvation/utopia, that’s a pretty sweet deal. Most religions encourage you submit to the will of God so that He can change you from the inside out, and that’s not the least bit pleasant, what with all that humility and deep introspection you have to invest and the ego you have to lose.
Nope, it’s much easier to become “good” by assenting to a proposition and then working to force everyone else to accept it than to change yourself through admitting your weaknesses and repentance. It’s also much more satisfying to exert that coercive force: there’s a real kick to it, whether it’s a Revolution or Jihad or Revival or what have you.
There’s a saying in my church: The world would take the man out of the gutter, but God would take the gutter out of the man, who then takes himself out of the gutter.
That’s why the Left tends to think that the Right is Evil (rather than merely having bad ideas): because for them, the locus of goodness is your outward profession of belief (political position) and your oh-so-good intentions. When we on the Right talk in terms of What Works and the limitations of human nature, to them it looks like we’re trying to get out of being “good” by “providing rhetorical cover” for our and others’ bad behavior.
It’s been my hypothesis for a long time that one of the primary human drives is leadership. It comes in two polarities, the desire to lead and the desire to be led; like all such drives, different individuals express it in different degrees, from not at all to the point of insanity; and, again like all such drives, it’s a slightly modified version of what’s found in “lower” animals — a herd of cows that doesn’t have a dominant animal within it behaves very strangely. It’s easy to see why that might be so, from an evolutionary standpoint. Human beings are nearly helpless when compared to even wolves, much less saber-toothed tigers, and the only way they survived in the wild was to work effectively in groups. The leader of such a band got advantages — more food, more access to sex — so it’s easy to see why the drive to be a leader was conserved. The desire to be led is more subtle, but, again, people who were successfully led had more reproductive success than those who were not, and their greater number counterbalances the greater advantage of the leader; evolution always works (though not necessarily the way we think it does.)
“Leadership desire”, both polarities, has another thing in common with basic drives: it manifests itself in ways that aren’t rational, and which the individual manifesting it may not (and often is not) conscious of. The preference of adolescent and postadolescent girls for “bad boys” is a particularly egregious example which comes at a nasty confluence of the sex and leadership drives.
I can riff on this for kilowords. In this particular case —
If you saw it, think back on my post elsethread about the machine with no controls. Now that there isn’t a Soviet propaganda machine to keep them in line, they are utterly bereft of leadership and are desperately searching for some. People seeking leaders are susceptible to being fooled by unscrupulous leader-wannabees, and even more susceptible to accepting people who display leadership qualities. I must emphasize that this is not only not a rational acceptance, in many (perhaps most) cases it isn’t even a conscious one.
There are few people in the world today exhibiting more of the classic symptoms of leadership than the Islamists. Among the most prominent is their absolute appearance of certainty. One of the things that they teach you in the military is the necessity for commanders to give the appearance of being sure of themselves and their orders; it may well be the fundamental component. The Left, bereft of leadership, is splintering and running off in multiple contradictory directions. It is inevitable that they should be drawn, often without realizing it, to voices that vibrate with ultimate self-confidence.
And lest you be too self-satisfied about that, it happens to us Rightists, too. It might help if, before you get too down on the Left, you do a bit of self-examination. Sometimes the result ain’t pretty.
Regards,
Ric
(all of Ace’s writings are great)
No. They’re not. They’re just not. I like him too alright but, no. The finger of greatness has not touched the writing of this Ace.
Wow, wow and more wow. You guys use really, really big words!! For me, an elder that won’t see past the 2020 mark if that long, all I gotta say is that too many people take themselves too seriously about just anything and screw the whole thing up! Or, you force people to hide behind their hands, their clothes, their walls, their families, their religion about anything that has to do with sex and look what you end up. Sick, horny ideologues wanting their 72 virgins. I could be wrong, cause just look at the tinfoil hatted leftist loons and you get the impression their mommas didn’t love ’em, particularly that Marko’s guy.
“…a herd of cows that doesn’t have a dominant animal within it behaves very strangely. It’s easy to see why that might be so, from an evolutionary standpoint.”
Here is a nice visual aid for that point, Ric:
http://tinyurl.com/2rgo4t
be sure and watch it all the way through, it has a bit of a surprise ending. I am sure the little fellow at center stage would have appreciated a leader with a bit more decisiveness.
Man, what cave have you been living in?
It comes in two polarities…
I think there’s at least a third – those that desire to serve the leader, or the larger society, which is different than the desire to be led. The ones that desire to be led, at one extreme, simply don’t want to take any responsibility. Those with an ethic of service, they can be quite helpful. Or dangerous.
psychologizer – I love reading your stuff. Your name is not orangey. It really should be orangey.
Ric Locke: That was well said, as always. Thanks; there’s a lot to think about there.
I think progressive ideology is like a religion because it provides two things individuals seem to require to have a guilt free conscience. Confession. In the form of public self criticism. And redemption which takes the form blaming the larger society. One is, in the end, cleansed. No longer part of the ignorant masses.
those that desire to serve the leader, or the larger society…
I should have explained that better. I was looking to carve out a space for individuals – people who are relatively, (not sure if this is a great word) self-actualized. Whose lives and work find validation within their own system of values, and negotiate a place within society that’s supportive of that system of values, or at least minimizes conflict. I really do think it’s these people that so much depends on, moreso even than the leaders.
Personally, I found the revelation of Munzenberg’s role in engendering all the evil Stalinist memes of the brainwashed Left to be the most arresting part of Koch’s article–and it’s a fascinating article, you should read it in its entirety. You can actually tie all the deluded nonsense that spouts daily from the Left to the efforts of one specific man. I was wondering who to blame. His goal of destroying anti-totalitarianism in Western society has largely succeeded. Wherever in hell Munzenberg is, he is laughing his ass off at these dupes. All of his seed has borne fruit.
Abashed the Devil stood
and saw how awful good was?
TW: physio vowels
PS: don’t skewer me on the exact quote, I’m drawing from memory
Rush Limbaugh asserts that the left is driven by their emotions. Ric Locke’s riff on the leftist religion seems to explain a mechanism of how the left gets their emotional fix and how they can be so incredibly resistant to rational argument. Is there nothing one can do to break through their bullshit?
I’ve been trying ridicule but as personally emotionally satisfying as it may be, there seems to be no particular effect. Anybody got any other suggestions?
On whom? If you’re arguing with them to change their minds you’re wasting your time.
The objective should be to render their views unpalatable to the undecided. Provoking the Believers to spittle-flecked outrage can be useful that way.
klrfz1: “…they can be so incredibly resistant to rational argument.”
Don’t waste your breath. They are *completely* resistant to rational argument.
TW: railroads lingering. AMTRAC?
“You can’t reason someone out of a position they’ve emoted their way into.”
It says Stephen Koch re-wrote his book on Munzenberg in 2004. There’s an email for him there as well.
“You can’t reason someone out of a position they’ve emoted their way into.”
So you emote them out. Like this…
TW: Druid Relation. That oughta do ‘er.
…satisfying as it may be, there seems to be no particular effect. Anybody got any other suggestions?
Nuke ’em from orbit.
It’s the only way to be sure.
Integrate? Aw man! I forgot all my calculus…
Uh… (moral justification for one’s life)^2 + C… +… uh… ((profoundly)^2)(cos(ister events))…
Damn. Professor? Got any scratch paper?
I had been wondering who the Bokonon of Progressivism was. Too bad about the hanging death of Münzbureger. Folks like him deserved to have seen the fruits of their labor, preferably from inside one of the gulags he helped enable.
TW: French static.
ccs: Still in early planning stages, but I figure we can go in through Hungary, make a quick dash to Wien, then hang a left and smash our way straight up the Danube to Salzburg. If we push it hard, and take no prisoners, we can probably be in Munich for Oktoberfest…
Heute Wien, Morgen das Oktoberfest!
SB: zeal Abercromby
Oh yes. Need a new suit.
klrfz1,
I read the article on Münzenberg aand did as Jeff suggested – I compared and contrasted the faux outrage generated by the Comintern concerning Sacco-Vanzetti with the faux outrage generated by their heirs concerning Guantanmo and I’ll be damned if I can come up with a dime’s worth of difference. I’m not at all sure what the gain might be from actually communicating with today’s useful idiots.
I think I’ll stick with ridcule. It’s not too tough, they earn it every damn day and they’re not worth anything more.
… So bottom line, they hate our freedoms. This is that wide-ranging rhetoric the right needs to counter or emphasize, depending on expedience? Good luck with applying calculated and seasoned tactics to blind, slobbering rage. At least according to some poll, the surge is working, whatever that means.
I defend my formulation on the grounds that my context was limited. Limited simply to what I think are innate human drives – ministering and being ministered to. These comprise the core of ANY religion, not just the ‘successful’ religions. In some sense, forced conversion is the religion acting like a state (I.E. treading down its enemies physically.) So I don’t see how it applies. The idea of ‘salvation’ is the ultimate hat trick of ministry – or, well, tantamount to it anyway. The paramount of all ministering is to become a star in the sky – eternal and great. To be saved and not be destroyed is nice, but to be remembered or venerated for eternity is all the much nicer. Were someone to give that to you? Yeah.
As for the ultimate in ministering to? How about saving the world – everyone.
So, you’ve got pretty much both in this form of ‘Lying for the Truth’. Its the religion of Hell.
I don’t get all this freaky metaphysical clam-digging. Iraq or not?
What does TW stand for?
Cincinnatus – TW – Turning Word, the random word generator used to defeat spambots.
“I don’t get all this freaky metaphysical clam-digging. Iraq or not?”
Iraq. I’ll go there and help – give me a few months to get ready – say, until November?
Cincinnatus – before going back to the plow, TW = Turing Word (or, how to defeat spam) Those are the words you will see below at ReCAPTCHA – you have to enter them to make your post, thus, allegedly, proving you are human (see also, Alan Turing, early computer pioneer).
Ric,
I dunno – I wasn’t much of a leader back in the day – ROTC, OBC, OAC and CAS3 aside. I found such later in life. 38 yoa to be exact. When a whole village of Afghan men said they would kill all of us – my interpreter first, me next, then the rest of my patrol. I found it at that moment. I think I have retained it since. At least there were some Marines and Soldiers that might have thought so – but this is starting to get awful…conceited? My point being, sometimes Leadership can come about later in life. the committed follower? Maybe they can wake up too.
Maybe I should just lay off the Two Buck Chuck.
Major John – I suspect that others saw those qualities in you long before you saw them.
As you note, klrfz1, Ric’s post (along with his and BJTxs’s post in “Confessions of a self-loathing narcissist”) point up the substitute “spirituality” of deifying entirely subjective principle and then making it stick quite literally no matter what. While discussions of moral or spiritual absolutes are themselves always problematic, we don’t need to go anywhere near there to “get” Leftism: Drop back a few mental light years to find just how easy it is to fall into its lazy trap. It’s just replacement gods and everybody’s got at least one. Reason? Forget about it? The point isn’t reason, it’s superiority, damn the consequences.
From that realization, it’s relatively simply to plug in the other bits: Envy and theft as legal socialist policy, political moralizing where there’s no real principle whatsoever, suppressing expression, dissent, and speech, the Left’s bald-faced racism and classism, and on and on. That’s all just nonsensical replacement dogma too.
It’ll never make sense and therefore, it’ll never respond to reason. It’s entire point is to be “progressive” and the first step to progress is to violate conservable values. It’s fascism; it just burns what it cannot abide.
The Conservative doesn’t argue for a particular brand of activist, benevolent government. The very point of conservatism is to resist the inevitable onrush of government when it becomes, as it always will, subject to abused power — these days, it’s the largely unquestioned and uncontested Religion of State. And the first thing that substitute religion needs is a mass of adherents willing to deny reason by asserting some Principle. The Left’s principle is clearly that its ideal government is God, perfectly fair, perfectly benevolent, perfectly loving.
Jeff writes about it daily: The point will never be to make sense and it therefore makes no sense to reason with it. The point will always be just to dominate. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I actually give timmah credit for giving rise to his obvious ire here in print — the conflict is palpable. Most Leftists simply reach up behind their left ears and flip the denial switch to on and walk away. See, they know better. Bad religion has no sense of accountability.
With such a terribly compromised premise, the product can’t be expected to make sense. I have presented perfectly fashioned fact that utterly refutes elements of underlying, foundational Leftist theory time and again. To them it’s like it simply does not exist. It cannot; if it did it’d defy the Religion. Something always has to give and that something’s reason.
JD – but I have no evidence until 2004 of such.
Jeff, this is a bit off topic but I would love to see your analysis of Michael Ignatieff’s reversal of his former support of the Iraqi mission and possibly the WOT. This man will likely be the next Prime minister of Canada.
Major John – People sense leaders. It is not because of individual actions, though a leader can certainly be highlighted by same. Especially in the military, from my experience, people can sense who is genuinely squared away, and gets it. In my experience, this is most prevalent amongst the enlisted in their interactions with officers. You may not have seen outward evidence prior to ’04, but those young men and women already knew what kind of man you were.
The Slate article seems to come down to the the usual left point that it’s all Bush’s fault. If he just had been nicer to Bin Laden and not called him and his followers such awful things then we could all “just get along”. According to Slate Bush’s rhetoric has divided the world into two warring camps and that this is the true goal of Al Qaeda, not the world wide Caliphate which the relegate to being an generalized wish not a specific item that Al Qaeda is working to accomplish.
geoffb – It is remarkable, no? We could have discussed things with AQ and maybe reached some kind of peace? Good gawd. We could ask for their Top 10 grievances, and capitulate to all of them, and they would still want to strap on some C4 and kill them some Joooooos and infidels. Their greivances are but an excuse to maintain their jihad.
I agree that people can sense leaders. A couple of years ago a young man hired in to my company. He had been wounded in Iraq as a member of the 101st Airborne and was getting treatment at our local VA. He praised Gen. Petraeus (whom I had not heard of then) to the skies. He felt that Petraeus was the only officer who understood how to fight this enemy.
In my own case I’ve been happy to work for the same boss for many many years because he is the best leader i’ve ever worked with an any company. All the other sections of our small business have a lot of turnover but the section I work in doesn’t. A good leader attracts others to themselves.
One other thing before I have to head to bed.
The Left’s religion is the Religion of State so their craziness is understandable if not acceptable since in their eyes, since 1994 and even now with the Presidency in Bush’s hands, the devil has assaulted and taken control of heaven. An intolerable state of affairs for them.
McGehee, Bostonian, … thanks. I guess what I want is some technique that has a hope of causing a leftist to abandon their emotion temporarily so that reason has some space in which to be heard. But the best I’ve been able to accomplish with ridicule is to induce rage which does not leave any room for reason.
Thinking back, the emotion I was feeling when I started to change from Democrat to Republican was disgust. I was disgusted with the actions of the Democratic journalists who were interviewing President Reagan on TV. I just couldn’t be part of a group that treated the President of the United States with such disrespect. And they weren’t even comparing him to Hitler or fantasizing about his assassination at the time. My disgust with the media gave me (somehow) a chance to compare Democrat rhetoric with Democratic reality. I just don’t know how I’d get someone who believes Michael Moore’s ridiculous propaganda to feel disgust toward him.
tw: compliment said
Oh, go on. Right back at ya.
Oops, should have closed that italic.
tw: laconic ordinance
Smart bombs that talk, a little.
“Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.”
-Robert A. Heinlein
Major John,
There are a host of things we use in our daily lives that are adaptations of things that occur in nature. We take some natural effect, systematize and mechanize it, and use it for our ends. An airplane doesn’t fly like a bird; it uses the same physical laws, but the realization is different.
The same is true of leadership. We have, over the millenia, observed certain behaviors and qualities that are associated with leaders. When we tabulate and organize that list, we discover that most, if not all, of those behaviors and qualities are teachable, and that a person who diligently learns them can function adequately as a leader. Naturally, a person who also has the aptitude can learn more and perform better. Think of it the way we do of musicians: there are a few people around who have such a strong natural aptitude that they can perform without training; there are many more who have some degree of aptitude who learn to perform given training; and there are a few who absolutely lack the aptitude, but can perform at some minimal level if they diligently apply the principles.
That is the essence of “command” as a concept, and clearly your teachers and superiors understood that and took pains to teach you. Equally clearly you did have the aptitude, or you would not have learned enough to rise to O-4 before the effort became too cumbersome. Congratulations on your “aha!” moment. It will make your life as a military officer easier in future; now, go forth and do likewise for the lieutenants and sergeants who depend on you. If we had to depend entirely on naturally-occurring leadership we would be woefully short of leaders, and just as an airplane flies better than a bird in some ways, applying a form of engineering to “leadership” has advantages, especially when seeking uniformity in an organization.
Regards,
Ric
You can read successive fatwas (I did that once) and see Osama/Zawahiri and crowd add on “grievances” in a pragmatic fashion, as they become useful grievances.
For example, Osama didn’t used to mention “Palestine” but then, one day, it made his major sh!t list of…”things to be aggrieved over.”
And then those guys pick up on popular trash, like their Michael Moore’s “my pet goat” reference. There was some popular reference in Zawahiri’s most recent long missive (which I don’t recall off the top of my head) where these guys use the junque they’re watching on satellite TV to try to make points about American culture/the infidel…(fill in the blank).
Their level of verbal attack, insinuation and naiveté would make them not to be taken seriously except, of course, for the murderous intent that has turned that charming 28 year old from Orange County CA, Adam Gadhan.
“Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.â€Â
-Robert A. Heinlein
(oh yeahhh, baby…)
To which Orwell was said to have asked (quite reasonably), “But where is the omelette?â€Â
Not done yet. Please pass the eggs.
–The Left
TW: idiotic Relations. OK, this is too much like the breakfast table for me.
Not done yet. Please pass the eggs.
–The Left
I would change that to:
Not done yet. Please pass a few million more eggs.
–The Left
TW Chandler hostings, What is this? Friends references.