The center hasn’t held and the pieces fly away. Without the most basic sorts of order, the sorts of order which are specifically labeled `moral’ aren’t possible, at least not on a large-scale such as that of the United States or even that of the city of Springfield, MA less than a quarter mile away from me as I write. No one is foolish enough to deny that even street-gangs founded by teenagers have engaged and still engage in small-scale criminal conspiracies to control drugs and hookers and gambling. When the stakes rise high? Perhaps to control of the budget of the Department of Defense (DOD) with its Rumsfeld-announced missing money of about $2 trillion? We could guess the harsh truth in Lord Acton’s dictum that the problem (one at least) with powerful and centralized governments is that they attract men with the moral character of gangsters.
Let me diverge slightly on the subject of a corrupt DOD—which does not mean that the fighting men are necessarily corrupted though some would have to be to allow this level of thievery. David Walker was the government’s internal auditor for much of the Clinton and Bush II administrations. He had the responsibility of putting the Federal government’s accounts on a rational basis such as that used by businesses and he estimated missing DOD funds at about $800-900 billion as I recall, still a large amount of money to have been embezzled, stolen, misused, or whatever. But remember that money spent as Congress had directed is still a source of power, including that of paying for goods and services from businessmen friends and of giving jobs to specific individuals who support you politically or even types of individuals likely to support you.
I’ve read enough history to know that such observers as the Irish political scientist William Lecky noted that the American people were morally well-ordered but the American political class was the most corrupt in the world—circa 1890. This was the opinion of many observers even before that and of many more since that period. The United States has been an experimental dance along the edge of a cliff since at least the passing on of the generation of the Founding Fathers and it’s quite possible that their Enlightenment ideas created the openings for such moral disorder at the leadership level, a disorder which eventually seeped into the most sedate of American smalltowns and city neighborhoods. We’ve fallen off that cliff and are yet to slam against the bottom.
Bertrand de Jouvenel, the French political scientist, noted that the United States political system was dominated by political machines operating behind the scenes, though everyone including the writers of Miracle on 42nd Street know of these machines which make money only by delivering the goods in terms of laws, judges, policemen, and so forth which are favorable to the paying customers. Intelligent politicians and judges and others are undesirable and those with moral character will make it impossible to guarantee the goods will be delivered. The reader can follow through to the disedifying conclusions which are, in fact, realized in American history.
Early on, the Tammany Society was formed—see Tammany Hall where we can read these introductory words:
Tammany Hall, also known as the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order, was a New York City political organization founded in 1786 and incorporated on May 12, 1789, as the Tammany Society. It was the Democratic Party political machine that played a major role in controlling New York City and New York State politics and helping immigrants, most notably the Irish, rise up in American politics from the 1790s to the 1960s. It controlled Democratic Party nominations and political patronage in Manhattan from the mayoral victory of Fernando Wood in 1854 through the election of John P. O’Brien in 1932.
So it is that the American political system from that early year had a means for political opportunists and crooks (Aaron Burr, an early member, was more a case of an odd mixture of talent, moral substance, and a moral willfulness resulting partly from a rebellion against his father, the Calvinist theologian who was the first president of what became Princeton, and his grandfather, the famous Calvinist preacher Jonathon Edwards.) Don’t think things have changed that much. Two men of different political attitudes but similar regard for their country, Eugene McCarthy and James Buckley, formed an alliance in the 1970s to fight the so-called election reforms which they claimed, rightly as it has turned out, to be no more than a means of consolidating machine power in the national committees of the Republican and Democratic parties.
Put that political corruption alongside the joyful discovery of certain types of humanoids that there was much money to be made in modern wars and the 007 or comic book mentality inculcated in the CIA black-ops officers and agents by Allen Dulles and you have a ruling elite which helped the United States along in the final stages of moving from barbarism to decadence.
Far too many of the ordinary citizenry, though seeming moral in much of their activity, have adopted the personality structures of decadent barbarism—we never really stopped being barbarians but now consciously glory in our low moral and cultural state. How many, including allegedly devout Christians and Jews, have set their children in front of James Bond movies to absorb a worldview of absolute good and absolute evil, where the guy who represents absolute good kills ruthlessly when he wills to and also takes advantage of buxom young ladies, while generally living it up on the taxpayer dollar. Then, off to church on Sunday to commiserate with fellow church-goers about the tendencies of modern young men to take advantage of young women or to respond inadequately to young women not meeting James Bond standards of breast-shape. As for young women taking on their fate as sex objects?
So… Is there any order, hierarchical or otherwise, in this devil’s playground filled with morally perverse adolescents? Can we identify gangs in the ruling elites or at least classes with well-defined interests? I can’t present any good analysis laying out any such gangs or classes as I noted in Who Are the American Elites and Are They Conspirators?. I don’t know if it is even possible to make a clean separation of corporate marketing departments in Lockheed and General Dynamics and those others who deal in all sorts of illegal weaponry and drugs and human slaves. Those who understand supply and demand in the fast-food industry think there to be a clean separation between different supply sources of weapons and also that the `evil’ weapon suppliers will deal in drugs and slaves but not the `good’ American corporate or governmental weapons suppliers. Against that, I’ll merely point out there is one international market for weapons and there are degrees of sliminess but overlapping ways of satisfying demands.
I do have a warning for those who think the money flows from Wall St tell us the investment bankers control the politicians. Those money flows might well be not the buying of those elected leaders and government workers but rather the payment of protection money. After all, few will hear that bar-owners and other businessmen men in a city are paying money to a gangster and then conclude those businessmen are buying the gangsters. In fact, the relationship is probably more complex than either simple bribes or protection money. There is no doubt that J P Morgan and John D Rockefeller owned the souls of a lot of politicians, regulators, and so forth but Teddy Roosevelt proved a headstrong politician who realized the nature of his own power could stand up even to such domineering figures. Of course, they did him in in his second effort to win the White House on his own, but it cost them a lot and it was far from certain they were going to win against the Rough-rider even when they used all the means at their disposal, short of assassination. Which they might well have considered—I have no illusions about men who devote themselves to gathering in power and wealth.
The other warning I have is: conspiracies are tools and not any sort of structure, political or social or so forth. Conspiracies might be ongoing projects with vague goals, such as those of the think-tanks and Bilderberg meetings, in which an effort is made to gain disciples or to spread the message. Think-tanks and other groups can and have engaged in specific conspiracies, such as the justification of the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003. These softer sorts of groups more often have vaguer goals, more long-range and compatible with the objectives of differing groups in the ruling class or academic class or whatever; the Rhodes scholarship program was such a longer-range project and never, to my knowledge, associated directly with any criminal conspiracy but rather with the effort of Cecil Rhodes and his followers to unite the English-speaking world in an effort to engulf all of mankind in Anglo-American culture.
We live in an age when historical awareness is very high and very much manifested in various scientific or pseudo-scientific forms. I would expand this general idea to include all sorts of rationality, good forms and defective forms, including engineering types of design. Elitism has become something of a project by powerful and wealthy families with some sort of communal self-awareness—though still necessarily operating within the context of possibilities and constraints we can somewhat guess at and understand by way of the newer and more exact understandings of human nature made possible by the results of modern historical investigations and analyses as well as by the results of sociobiology and other sciences.
See my freely downloadable book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, for an effort to tame all this knowledge to a human understanding of this world viewed as a morally well-ordered story being told by our Maker. My other writings, all part of my general efforts to update the Christian understanding of Creation, are described in Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston.