To understand how political power works, you have to understand the basic unit of politics, which is the individual “con-job”. Political power structures are not the result of nebulous collective forces or abstractions. They are created by individual human beings. These are not ordinary human beings, with ordinary motives, but specialists, with motives distinct from those that move you or me. In fact, it is the very ordinariness, reasonableness, and predictability of our motives that enables specialists in power acquisition to flourish among us. The specialist in power acquisition operates, like any predator, by strategies of which it is conscious, but its prey is not. Theories of history which interpret the activities of rulers, aristocracies, and power elites as acting unconsciously, or driven by collective “belief systems” or ideologies are profoundly off the mark.
No person exercising political power on a large scale believes in any “ideology” except the ideology of “it’s a good thing for me to exercise power”. If you imagine that, say, Fidel Castro cares anything whatsoever about Dialectical Materialism, of cares anything about the fate of the Cuban people ― except in so far as these things are useful to him in the exercise of power ― then you don’t have the absolutely fundamental, necessary information for understanding history and politics. The same goes for George W. Bush, Jr. If you imagine that he has any interest in the fate of America, or the welfare of Americans, forget it. He has none. Zero. These things have no influence whatsoever on any of his actions. However, fostering the belief that they are motivated by “ideas” or “values” or “ideologies”, or are the product of religions, or political philosophies, is one of the most tried and true methods by which power seekers and successful power elites achieve their ends. It is an extremely versatile method, because it neutralizes their most dangerous potential opponents ― intelligent people motivated by concern for the common good ― and allows them to organize and herd the less dangerous majority. The specialist in power knows that bureaucrats, academics, students, journalists, or people engaged in ordinary pursuits of business, science, public administration, or useful professions can be kept busy and distracted trying to interpret their actions in terms of professed ideas and nebulous “systems”. In the meantime, such specialist deploy their chess pieces in strategically useful positions, and determine their actions strictly in terms of simple, unequivocal motives: destroy enemies, get power. Wealth and power are distinct only in that wealth is deferred, or stored power, like electricity in a battery.
Ideologies do motivate large numbers of people, who remain vulnerable to manipulation to the degree that they take the ideas seriously. Successful power seekers sense this weakness in underlings, cultivate it, and make use of it. For example, George W. Bush, Jr. attracted a coterie of Neo-Conservative punks around himself. They had long been scheming for an invasion of Iraq, and where acting on the precepts of a complicated ideological formula, which happily coincided with their determination to enrich themselves. In their daydreams, America would usher its way into a new age of imperial power by crippling OPEC’s control of oil. By invading Iraq, and then “privatizing” its abundant oil fields, which OPEC had carefully kept in controlled and limited production for generations, they thought this brilliant coup could be accomplished, with themselves well placed to collect both profit and glory. Come the invasion of Iraq, these Neocons had their henchmen in place to accomplish this. However, George W. Bush Jr.’s actual interests, alliances, and power base lies with OPEC, the traditional Oil Cartels, and the Saudi Royal Family that is its aristocracy. Their interests lay in disposing of the unreliable Sadam Hussein and controlling Iraq’s oil (at a nice, low level of output) through a single state oil monopoly which will follow OPEC discipline. After being enormously useful in the process of selling the invasion of Iraq to the American public, the Neocons were quickly sidelined, their policy of “privatizing” was terminated. Philip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil, was flown into Baghdad to lay down the law. Privatization ceased, and Sadam Hussein’s old oil administrators were re-installed in a brand new State oil monopoly. Soon, most of the original coterie of Neocon ideologues found themselves ignominiously purged from Bush’s administration. In a rare moment of sponteneity, Carroll explained to an unusually inquisitive journalist: “Many neo-conservatives have certain ideological beliefs about markets and democracy and this, that and the other. International oil companies, without exception, don’t have a theology, they don’t have a doctrine.”[1]
This single sentence is a capsule description of real “ideology” of ruling elites in every time and every place.
Ideologies, however do play a role in history … just not the role that historians imagine. They vary in intellectual quality. At the lowest level of both the intellect and morality, you have the ideology of Karl Marx and Adolph Hitler ― merely an overt program of slavery and genocide decorated with moronic racist rantings and incoherent pseudo-scientific gibberish. Others are less monotonous, being merely modifications of traditional religions and political institutions, or clusters of arbitrary symbols and markers. Once they cease to be “players”, the arbitrariness of these symbols is obvious to everyone; while they are “players” you cannot convince anyone of it. For centuries, Europe was divided among the ideological adherents of “Guelphism” and “Ghibelinism”. It was as pervasive a conceptual mumbo-jumbo as is the idiotic “left vs right” mumbo-jumbo of today. As it is today, the actual politics on the ground consisted of “paradoxical” strategic alliances between “ideological opponents” against “ideological brothers”, because the successful power seekers no more believed in their official mumbo-jumbo than today’s power seekers do in theirs. The only people who actually believed in the ideologies were the suckers who ended up decapitated or skewered on battlefields.
It can be entertaining, and fascinating, to spend time classifying and analyzing the details of these ideologies. Their robustness comes from their built-in contradictions and misdirections, which give them the ability to survive any kind of embarrassment from mere reality. Thus, the Medieval Church simultaneously held that happiness and justice lay in an eternal life after death, but also that the “soul” was neither your consciousness nor your memory, neither of which would survive death. When you think of it, this should be no more comforting than the knowledge that your subscription number to Readers’ Digest lives on after you die. Hundreds of millions persist in imagining that Marxism has something to do with “equality”, even though there is not even the slightest, microscopic element of equality in his theories, which are entirely devoted to the establishment of a hierarchical, totalitarian tyranny based on the production of slave labour. As many millions bizarrely associate Conservatism with “free market theory”, though no Conservative has ever, or ever will advocate, promote, or enable anything remotely resembling a free market. The obsessions and demands of American “Christians” almost invariably consist of things diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. But to pursue these endless convolutions of contradiction is to misunderstand the purpose of ideologies.
As intellectual constructs, ideologies are fraudulent assemblages of lies and misdirection, specially constructed to be useful to power elites. They are not the political, social or philosophical equivalents of theories in science, or attempts to find some kind of truth. Clever people who don’t exercise significant power may believe they are, but nobody who exercises power does. Those who believe in them either never figure this out ― they are usually the ones who end up in the first wave of purges, digging ditches at gunpoint for their own execution ― or they slowly catch on, and learn how to manipulate the formulas to preserve themselves. These last end up doing the hard work in the organization and manning the middle levels of the Fuehrer’s empire. But at the top of the pyramid, there is never anybody who believes. That simply never happens. Belief is ipso facto the quality of underlings, the chumps, the suckers. Is George Bush a patriotic American? Not possible. Does Pat Robertson believe in Christianity? An absolute impossibility. He and Jerry Falwell certainly had no problem with accompanying George H.W.Bush in a mission to give Sudan’s dictator Jaafar Nimeiri $1.4 billion in cash and weapons for his campaign to exterminate Christians.[2] Does Osama bin Ladin believe in Islam? [how do you spell a burst of snorting laughter?]
There is an unusually perceptive scene in the old Carol Reed film The Third Man. I don’t know if it comes from Graham Greene’s novel, or if it’s one of Orson Welles’ notoriously clever ad libs. Welles plays a criminal huckster peddling deadly diluted penicillin in the post-WWII black market: “The politicians talk about the People and the Proletariat. I talk about the muggs and the suckers. It’s the same thing.”
The weakness in democracies is not any kind of functional failure of “the system”. In terms of producing prosperity, safety, justice, and spiritual wellbeing, the partially functioning democracies of the world are a million times more successful than all the one-party states and totalitarian tyrannies of the world. Their weakness is that they are filled with middle-level administrators who are not nearly as power-driven as those in tyrannies. Their parliaments and congresses are filled with moderately honest, partially sincere “politicians” who keep their competitive ruthlessness “within the rules” and balance personal greed or ambition with at least a vague interest in their country or their constituents. Their schemes and ambitions are timid, they are partially driven by beliefs they actually hold, or they feel answerable to others in some way. Ultimately, they can’t bring themselves to believe that their opponents in non-democratic regimes aren’t similarly constrained. They expect some kind of “consistency” from dictators and global corporate honchos and really believe that these creatures are acting on the basis of some set of abstract values or aims outside of themselves. This delusion is, to the truly powerful, a vulnerability that they can run rings around. To the truly powerful, the real or half-hearted honesty and values of run-of the mill politicians in the democracies are what the loneliness and bank account of a widow are to an experienced gigolo.
Unfortunately, the higher levels of democratic polities eventually fill up with the real article, the real power seekers. The United States, for instance, is far too old, far too big, far too rich, and far too powerful a polity to be like Iceland, or even Canada. At the top levels, the truly ruthless rule, as dedicated to pure evil as their counterparts in Beijing, the Kremlin, or Riyadh.
It would be nice to think that an educated cynicism would be some kind of counterforce to this process, but the sad fact is that it isn’t. There are plenty of journalists and historians who are willing to say “yes, indeed, right-ee-oh” to everything I’ve just said, and doubtless the reader sees nothing original in my analysis. Well, there isn’t anything original in it. The problem is that, among clever people, it doesn’t stick. Intellectual cynicism is like wounded love. Every disappointment merely fires the hope that the next con-artist of romance will be “the real thing.” The world is full of acerbic, cynical critics of society who suddenly discovered salvation in Stalin, Mussolini, Castro, Mao, Daniel Ortega, or whoever trotted out the same line of malarky. At present, they are lining up to be saved by Hugo Chávez, an astonishingly lame and unoriginal version of the same old horse-shit. But ask any professional con artist. The best cons are the old cons. They always work because the always work. And smart people are always easier to con than dumb people, because smart people always believe they can’t be conned.
Nor does being cynical, even the way I chose to be cynical, afford me total protection. Just last week I found myself being caught up in the manipulative sophistries of an a acquaintance, really slurping it up. Like most clever people, I think of myself as too clever to be conned. The tools a successful schemer in politics uses are simply elaborations and extensions of the ones used on a smaller, more personal scale. Fortunately, I force myself to review my errors, now and then.
This is the real insight: understanding that power, psychological manipulation, and politics are not different at different scales. The ambitious tribesman maneuvering for control of the yam feast in the jungle highlands uses the same tricks and the same vulnerabilities as the yam-boss in the White House.
[1] These events were amusingly chronicled by the journalist and forensic accountant Gregory Palast, in Trillion Dollar Babies, reprinted in Armed Madhouse. Dutton. 2006. Palast is one of those frustrating people who has “almost got it”. Despite his investigative skills and sharp wit, he succumbs to the same old razzmatazz as everyone else, and remains imprisoned in orthodoxies. The book is filled with pitifully naïve fawning over the tin-pot Napoleon of Venuzuela, Hugo Chávez, whom he imagines to be an “alternative”. Plus ça change….
[2] Wallechinsky, David. Tyrants: The World’s 20 Worst Living Dictators. Regan / HarperCollins. 2006. p.13
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