Perfection
We'll start with a quote that stands by itself.
...the authority of the nation state itself depended on the economic dependence and political neutrality of its civil servants becomes obvious in our time; the decline of nations has invariably started with the corruption of its permanent administration and the general conviction that the servants are in the pay, not of the state but of the owning classes. At the close of the century the owning classes had become so dominant that it was almost ridiculous for a state employee to keep up the pretense of serving the nation."
What can I possibly say to illuminate that more than the quote does on its own?
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Who is the bourgeois?
Let's keep going on Arendt's mob...
"A rioting mob is not composed of any particular class but from 'the refuse of all classes. ... What they failed to understand is that the mob is not only the refuse but the byproduct of bourgeois society, directly produced by it and therefore never quite separable from it...
The implication here is that the bourgeois produces a mob by pursuing bad policies.
So this definition depends on who the bourgeois actually is. Fortunately there's a lot of blame to go around.
If the bourgeois is the millionaire class, then the explanation is pretty obvious. By letting the economy grow so unequal, by slashing taxes to the 1% to so low a rate, by cutting government spending on welfare programs, education, job training, and social services, the government flattened social mobility, ended the growth of working class income, and created a dissatisfied mass of over 150 million people. The reason then that the mob would have formed against the left rather than the right that slashed the programs is because the millionaire class funded a vast network of right-wing propaganda that distracted the masses with cultural issues of little consequence designed to create resentment against precisely those forces who mean to alleviate their frustration.
On the other hand, if the American bourgeois means the progressive 'creative class' we spoke about in the third talk, then the mob was created by precisely those cultural issues that the rightwing media speaks of: liberal hypocrisy in pretending to care for the poor while enriching themselves, claiming that poor whites are oppressors rather than victims, policing language about minorities while often holding white people to ridicule, tying disproportionate college acceptance and employment opportunity to race rather than income, and putting the concerns of relatively affluent minorities like certain parts of the queer community over straight poor whites (gay men earn 10% more than straight men). By this definition, many of the cultural complaints of the right wing are not without merit.
I'd ask which is the more likely explanation, but every liberal will take one side, every conservative will stand on the other.
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Fascination vs. Interest (double meaning)
",..notice high society's constantly growing admiration for the underworld, which runs like a red thread through the nineteenth century, its continuous step-by-step retreat on all questions of morality, and its growing taste for the anarchical cynicism of its offspring. '
By either definition, this creates a right-wing mob that the American 'elite' grows fascinated by. There are two explanations for this, and I think both have much true about them.
The first that the 'aristocratic elite' (meaning 'particularly affluent Americans') seeks to have ever more lack of accountability to consequence, and perpetually increase their money, power and influence. The viability of this explanation should be pretty obvious.
The other is that the 'elite' has a cheap, even pornographic fascination with a force so déclassé as a mob. The lure of the forbidden draws them to it. Being part of a 'mob' is usually the one thing you can't accuse an aristocrat of being. The 'mob' is the ultimate force that has no care for accountability to consequence. And so the elite uses all kinds of means at their disposal to egg the mob onward--both to advance their interests and excite themselves.
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Once Again, Self-explanatory
"Racism is a necessary tool if the powerful wish to make the powerless do their bidding."
Well duh.
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Double Duality:
Demographics vs. Morals
Exploitaion: funds rise or funds decline?
'...no matter what learned scientists say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.'
We could leave this as a truism, but there's an essay's worth of meanings here.
We do have to consider the double meanings inherent in 'humanity.' One meaning of 'humanity' is obviously humankind as a species, but it can also mean 'humanity' as in our capacity for moral compassion. In that sense, racism is obviously one of the traits that most prevents us from realizing our potential for humanity.
There's too much book to make an essay out of this, but just consider it for a moment; think of the Spanish Empire: discovering the New World was a death sentence for 95% of the Native American population, and even if Spain flourished from its flush of gold into a golden age, it was the moral, spiritual death of Spain, not just in the new world but in the old world where suspected heretics were burned after confessions obtained under torture, and an eighty-year war because of their colonization of the Low Countries (Holland & Belgium). Sometimes, virulent racism signified the actual end of a country's dominance: obviously the Nazis severely depleted Germany's international standing until quite recently.
The ways decline manifests itself through racial thinking are many and varied, but is it decline if it results in greater affluence?
I don't know how to answer that except to note that many historians posit a cyclical theory of history where all things rise and fall, and if you view history through the lenses of patterns--and I'm not quite convinced history has any pattern, you can note that so many civilizations are in some senses built on an 'original sin'; what enables a rise is inevitably some form of blood money, and eventually the original sin catches up with a society. The Boyar class built Russia on the suffering of its peasants, and eventually the peasants rose up and liquidated the Boyars' noble descendants. Or think of Spain again: for centuries the Spanish lived off gold and genocide, but eventually the gold destabilized the Spanish economy and the Church used it to grow fat and powerful, so powerful they used their influence to fund an inquisition for centuries that rooted out 'heretics.' Spain may have been wealthy and powerful, but even at its most powerful, Spain lived in fear.
So here are two questions for you:
1. What do you think is the percentage chance that countries maltreating races will eventually backfire? How would it backfire?
2. By exploiting one race for the gain of another, are countries facilitating their own fall by instituting such inhumane, demeaning policies, or are they setting up their rise?
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Racism Against Patriotism
"Historically speaking, racists have a worse record of patriotism than the representatives of all other international ideologies together, and they were the only ones who consistently denied the great principle upon which national organizations of peoples are built, the principle of equality and solidarity of all peoples guaranteed by the idea of mankind."
Once again, I have to editorialize and say that I'm not sure about the veracity of this quote, but what can't be denied is that racism is a perfect excuse to sabotage one's own country. If an historically white-run country is, say, oh... I don't know... led by a black man, the racists not only have motivation to take sides against the government, they even have a motive to conspire with the country's historic enemy to take a more diverse government down. And if they're successful, they not only make this indefensible enemy into an ally, but their alliance compels them to incorporate into themselves many of their previous enemy's pathological traits that they'd formerly professed to loathe.
Since a country's more powerful races have incentive to like their country more, they often have more incentive to be patriots than those from less privileged races, and even if they have no racism in their hearts, they have plenty of incentive to act with racist manners. But the more they get to remind people of their superior status, the more powerfully they get to perceive themselves; which creates a self-reinforcing pathology in which they perceive themselves as deserving their own power because they act powerfully.
Which leads us to the next quote...
"Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible 'explanation' and excuse for its deeds, even if no race thinking had ever existed in the civilized world."
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'Gold hardly has a place in human production and is of no importance compared with iron, coal, oil, and rubber; instead, it is the most ancient symbol of mere wealth. In its usefulness in industrial production it bears an ironical resemblance to the superfluous money that financed the digging of gold and to the superfluous men who did the digging. To the imperialists' pretense of having discovered a permanent savior for a decadent society and antiquated political organization, it added its own pretense of apparently eternal stability and independence of all functional determinants. It was significant that a society about to part with all traditional absolute values began to look for absolute value in the realm of economics where, indeed, such a thing does not and cannot exist, since everything is functional by definition. This delusion of an absolute value has made the production of gold since ancient times the business of adventurers, gamblers, criminals, of elements outside the pale of normal, sane society.'
If there is no place in gold for human production, then what place is there for bitcoin?
When you talk to powerful Republicans, 9 out of 10 will tell you privately that 'I'm actually a libertarian.' Libertarians still have a yen for the erections they can build from gold. Their argument has always been that gold is a currency so solid that it will be there long after paper money disappears: yet now they're passionate about currency that has no physical presence at all. It's an astonishing transformation.
