Weaponizing the Poor

Monday, February 21st, 2011

Intellectuals have been weaponizing the poor for centuries, Shannon Love says:

For nearly 300 years, leftists and their ideological predecessors have been urging the “poor” to rise up and take from the “rich”. The intellectual justifications for why the poor have a moral and practical right to rise up continuously shift while the practical outcome of who actually ends up with the most benefit remains a constant. Clearly, the constant drives the creation of the justifications and not the other way around.

The constant is clear: manipulative intellectuals, i.e., people whose primary skills lie in manipulating the thoughts and emotions of others via persuasive communication, always end up on top of the new social and political order when the “poor” rise up.

Robespierre used a justification very different in detail than those used by Lenin, yet both were manipulative intellectuals and both ended up on top, however briefly, of their respective revolutions. We can see the same pattern today, even in America. No matter what the subject at hand — the economy, foreign policy, the environment, etc. — the leftwing manipulative intellectuals always argue for a solution which leaves them with more power, influence and status. Others may or not benefit from any particular solution proposed by the Left but the manipulative intellectuals always benefit. Any solution that might benefit the poor but which does not directly benefit manipulative intellectuals — e.g., school choice — gets shot down.

When leftist intellectuals argue that the poor should “rise up” in any manner, they just seek to exploit the travails of the poor for their own selfish benefit. The intellectuals take the anger and resentment of the poor, justified or not, and shape those emotions into a political tool to drive a change which will first and foremost benefit the leftist manipulative intellectuals.

In short, manipulative intellectuals seek to weaponize the poor.

Weaponizing the poor is easy. All social mammals, including humans, are no doubt genetically programmed to seek to subvert those who possess more status. We all face the temptation to take instead of make. Everyone can be tempted by an argument that we deserve something someone else has. The manipulative intellectuals simply direct our base impulses like an engineer diverting a river.

Leftists don’t actually care much about improving the lot of the poor. When they advocate some shift of resources to the poor they are just paying their troops. Pre-industrial aristocrats paid their armies primarily by giving them the opportunity to loot. Even when they paid their troops directly, they did so with money and land taken from their adversaries. War paid for war.

Leftists use the same technique. They “pay” poor people to fight for the interests of the manipulative intellectuals by creating moral, legal and political justifications for why the poor can loot the political and social rivals of the manipulative intellectuals. Just as with the aristocrats, the weaponized poor get just a notional chance of a small material improvement in their lives while the manipulative intellectuals get to dominate society.

Just as the nobles of old did not care how much damage they did to the communal wealth during a war as long as they personally came out ahead, manipulative intellectuals don’t care if society as a whole or the poor specifically come out the worse as long as the lot of the manipulative intellectuals improves. That is why we get places like Detroit or 1970s Britain. The manipulative intellectuals drove those regions into the ground while improving their own fortunes.

When the Left does provide an improvement in the lives of the poor, it does so largely by accident. Just as a stopped clock is correct twice a day, the Left’s continual weaponization of the poor does sometimes by sheer chance align with the poor’s actual best interest.

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