The Freedom to Starve

Over at Yastreblyansky's joint he's initiated a discussion of the sort of "freedom" the Trumpenscum and assorted tech billionaires like Musk and Thiel are pimping:

"...pursuing happiness has to be something we do collectively, as social beings. That makes it not only a different list, but also a different concept of what liberty is--I mean, making it into a slogan, the conservative idea is liberty from other people and the liberal idea is freedom with other people."

That's fine, as far as it goes. But I think the whole business is a lot simpler and more primal.

This is simply about a certain sort of person, the sort of person who gravitates towards something like the 2022 GOP and someone like Donald Trump, who wants to do whatever the fuck they want to do without a moment's thought for the consequences.

They don't want consequences, period. They want to be immune from ALL the shit their nonsense stirs up; gunfire, lawsuits, mean tweets, censorious looks...it's all about being able to be what they want without so much as a single hard look in return.

Now.

That's a kind of "freedom".

Tom Hobbes described it as "the war of all against all". It basically comes down to that if you can do what you want to without consequence, I can do what I want to, and if I'm bigger - stronger, smarter, richer, a bigger fucking sociopath - that you are, I can do it to you and you just have to suck it up.

It's the 21st Century Melian Dialogue; the rich do what they can, and everyone else - the poor, the dark, the non-cis-het, the planetary climate, everyone - suffers what they must.

It's not a very new concept, or a very original one.

And it only appeals to the sort of nitwit who thinks there can't be anyone bigger, stronger, smarter, more sociopathic, that they are.

In other words, the stupid, the greedy, and the egotistical fathead.

Which means it appeals to a Donald Trump. And all the little mini-Trumps out there (around here we just call them "assholes") who make up about maybe 60% of the GOP.

(...the other 40% or so are just fucking morons, QANuts and people like Margie Green who couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag. They're the "lean Objectivist jerky" that Scalzi talked about; the real monsters will, if they're lucky, keep them as pets (Greene will be some plutocrat's muppet as long as she keeps her looks) but in a pinch will make do with them as soylent green)

The problem is that a whole bunch of the inhabitants of the US circa 2022 - not just Republicans, unfortunately - have been so addled by the firehose of chatter they encounter every day that they have become largely unable to think their way through this. 

I mean...it's hard for ME to keep up with the constant stream of lies, damned lies, and commercials - Steve "I Fell Asleep With My Head In The Toilet" Bannon's "flooding the zone with shit" - and I'm a lifelong cynic, skeptic, and political junkie who is utterly immune to GQP nonsense.

So we have people who depend utterly on an impartial government to protect and defend them from rapacious fucksticks like Thiel and Musk and Exxon and Amazon and every other plutocrat who would be their kings...voting for people like DeSantis and Trump who think that they ARE kings and who will let these plutocratic scum BE kings.

(And the problem with Trump himself, of course, is that so long as someone like Thiel sucks his ass and lards him with flattery and bling Trump doesn't care enough about the actual kinging to get in the plutocrats' way. It's kind of ironic that Tubby loves him some Putin, because Vlad the Impaler made damn sure that he put the boot hard on the neck of his plutocrats. For a while after the crash in 1991 it looked like Russia would become just another kleptocracy, with the mob bosses, the New Rich, looting the joint while their pliant figurehead opened the shopping malls and chaired the committee meetings.)

I'm not sure what the hell the rest of us can do about this.

IMO the real issue is that in a massive industrial democracy the only way that the citizens can be involved and informed is through things like newspapers (increasingly irrelevant) and the various electronic media like television (cable and otherwise) and the various internet sites.

The outfits that inhabit these places, the ones that "inform" Americans, seem utterly unable to be clear about the simple reality I've laid out.

I'm not saying they have to be "against" the notion that the strong/rich do what they can...etcetera.

But that they make it clear that is what will happen without some sort of collective protection - whether in the form of a union, or a government (which is needed to back the union against the sort of money power the union's employer will use against it).

Without that?

You as an individual are prey.

Instead, as Jordan Orlando over at Rectification of Names points out (citing John Ganz here):

"An outline of the institutional shape of this politics is coming in to view as well: there’s rich donor oligarchy on top, in the middle there’s the think tanks, magazines, and podcasts that serve as kind of currency exchanges where the coin of mob grievance is turned into respectable notes, and the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters. 

In short, it’s a model of the kind of corporate society they wish to secure and reproduce on a larger scale: big bosses, middle-management, workers, all happily coordinated and cooperating. No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional managerial-classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations. The “cancellers” will themselves be cancelled: subjected to harassment and intimidation by the mob if they get out of line. There will be no epistemic hierarchy: just “freedom,” an informational anarchy that translates into the impossibility of the exchange of real content and any rational deliberation."

Yep. That's it. That's the plan.

Or, as Driftglass used to sum it up:

There's a club.

And you're not in it.

And people like Trump - and Musk, and Exxon, and Kroger - like it that way.