PJM Political 6/13/09: Will Soft Despotism Mean Lights Out For The West?
“I’m afraid the only way out of this situation is for a megadisaster to occur which the bureaucrats will be unable to handle and the people will execute a change.”
The bureaucrat track record is one of failure, but (and here is the real disaster), not too much of a failure. As Paul Rahe notes, this is a ‘soft’ despotism… it leeches away at peoples’ souls. Welfare is the most obvious example of what happens when people stop producing anything but government jobs: note that Gaza has been on welfare for some 3 generations; and then there are Canada’s “First Nations”, whose disintegration would in any other social system cause shame among even the rulers.
But Bureaucrats feel absolutely no shame because there is no individual responsibility felt or honoured within their ranks. Remember that the full horror of the Shoah comes from a not-fully-conscious knowledge that the killers were bureaucrats, with paperwork to fill out during the long days of slaughter.
And here there is the most terrible thing to know about a time of Bureaucracy: the system has no place for morality or kindness or any sort of nobility.
