It just can't get any better than this
An interesting study of power and hypocrisy from Andrew Sullivan.
How Power Increases Hypocrisy
"The researchers found that compared to participants without power, powerful participants were stricter in judging others’ moral transgressions but more lenient in judging their own: 'power increases hypocrisy, meaning that the powerful show a greater discrepancy between what they practice and what they preach.'
Nothing new there.
My favorite line from Andrew, though, is this one:
"Power corrupts. Always has. Which is why we need more assholes in the press and fewer people, like Mike Allen, annotating and revering every word that drops from the platters of the connected and the powerful."
Yeah, that's been a plan of pure genuis. Get back with me about how that's workin' for ya, fellas.
Cause from here, to quote the advertisers for the beer of choice for assholes, it just can't get any better than this.
3 comments:
I have, personally, never known a more convincing Master of the Universe. She-Ra won't even know what she has coming to her.
Exactly, dude. I never thought about it like that. But that may be exactly what's at the heart of all this.
Be nice, in the bigger picture, if that meant fewer people murdered and oppressed. Zero would be a fine number for me. But I'll take what I can get. Somewhere between zero and Mao. Let the haggling begin.
Reflecting on that comment, Carson, and on a conversation I had with a teacher, today, I think I understand all better now.
People pursue power out of insecurity, typically. Which explains why fear is a favorite strategy of the power-mongers among us. Nixon is a classic case. And the best case for how it falls apart, at some point. No matter how hopeless the cause of good people may seem at any point.
The truth is that it is our more neurotic and pathological impulses, in mental health language, that drive more regressive periods like the current ones.
The really crazy, foolish, and counterproductive guilty impulse about our hypocrisies, failures, and shortcomings.
I just realized, too, that that's what I'm seeing all the time in school. It's the neurotic tendency to look at our failures as functions of what is wrong with us rather than what we have not just developed, to this point.
And the psychopathology of that is that it this more pathological individual mental health is a function of a punitive, pathological mental health environment that is counterproductive, yet encourages interpretations of our behavior as something wrong with us rather than a failure or mistake to be corrected with understanding, learning and growth.
That explains, more broadly, the reason why people in illiberal and autocratic cultures often still favor their illiberal and autocratic leadership even when it is clearly, by any objective standard, bad for them.
Very much, I think, why people in America and liberal cultures favor policies, that, at least by my lights, by any objective criteria, make things worse rather than better, are bad for them, rather than better.
And the pathology of that broader political/cultural mental health environment is created by the various dishonest, manipulative actors in that environment who create, more broadly, that environment - through propaganda, primarily - and to the extent that average people internalize those interpretations and propaganda.
But the trick, Carson, that we're seeing right now, is that people will only internalize and put up with that shit for so long, especially when they have alternatives. And when people offer them alternatives that are healthier/better/support them better, they take them. Hence the importance of liberal democracies, for all the awesome frustration they create for partisans.
Because they can choose alternatives more readily without the destructive path of warfare, revolution, and rebellion which was the most common way that people challenged authority in the past. That, and, as Jefferson alluded to in the Declaration of Independence, putting up with shit until they couldn't/wouldn't put up with it anymore.
So we take liberal cultures take illiberal/regressive/neurotic/pathological directions as well.
But we don't stick with them as long. Because we have more freedom and more options to improve our situations.
So, just as in illiberal cultures, neurotic/illiberal/regressive/pathological (at the far end of that spectrum) players can be less honest, lie and manipulate and play games. But they can only do that for so long. Because honesty and the honest players offer better alternatives for people to choose from.
And that is how history gets made. All cynicism to the contrary.
Ask Hitler. Or Stalin. Or Johnson. Or Nixon.
Cause they all ate it. For good reason. Because Acton was right. And they gave right way to that temptation.
As did a lot of activists, journalists, politicians and financial and other folks during this period.
And what will turn the tide is what has always turned the tide.
Better alternatives. For reals, homey.
And, as always, the worse alternatives get left in the dust.
As Buffet says, time is the friend of the wonderful enterprise. And that is why good guys finish first, in business as with everywhere else.
I didn't tell you that my dad and I are gonna go to the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting next year. I'm looking forward. Buffet's been a brilliant reality check for me, during this period. As I was telling dad, it's folks like him, no the government, who are going to help dig us out of this whole. They'll do they're magic despite the government.
And soon enough, that will just be history. No spin necessary.
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