…some thoughts from Theodore Dalrymple.
6 thoughts on “A Plague of Highly-Ambitious Mediocrities”
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Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
…some thoughts from Theodore Dalrymple.
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I discovered Taki’s magazine when NRO fired Derbyshire. I find I’m going there at least as much as I read NRO. Interesting to see how the PC trend makes things dull.
Darlymple assumes that people who get an office do so because they intend to excel at doing whatever task the office performs. However there are people who crave the power the office wields or who see the office as a stepping stone to even greater power. We read about them, we watch them in movies and TV dramas but refuse to believe they exist. We encounter them in life an automatically avoid them or make ourselves invisible to them. We even fool ourselves that they do not exist in real life – even when we vote for or against them.
They are the stuff of history – they are the people that make our times interesying
They are not mediocre at misusing power. They grew up dreaming to be tyrants. They study tyrants.
I would think people would have been able to look at Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and recognize a certain type who surely everyone had met in their own lives, at work and/or in other kinds of organizations: the person who is always desperate to get promoted but feels no need to actually DO anything useful in whatever job he’s in at the moment, the person who does not see others as human but rather only as obstacles to be climbed over or tools in his own obsessive power-seeking, the person who can never analyze his own failures but only casts blame on others…especially, this should have been true after BO and HC had been in their respective jobs as president and sec state for a while…but evidently not. Which I guess shows the power of a compliant media, especially the power it has over people who don’t follow political affairs very closely and/or do not seek out multiple sources of information.
Marshall McLuhan had an explanation.
The medium is the message
“For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled “the scale and form of human association and action””
That’s what we have and the leftist trend of the medium, I think, is largely explained by a desire of people who perceive themselves as powerful to appear caring and sympathetic. They aren’t and they know they aren’t but they want to change Socrates aphorism from “Be what you wish to seem” to “Seem what you wish to seem.” Being has little to do with what you want to be seen as.
And that is why message control is so important to the Left: schools, news, entertainment are under their control. It’s absolutely key to their success, it shapes perception and values, both by what is emphasized and what is left out.
You won’t break Leftist control until you break that monopoly.