Those who punish are getting something done, namely punishment. Note who and what they punish to know what side they’re on and what they actually want. Ignore what they say and pay close attention to what they do.

When I realized this, I stopped trying to do what I was told and focused on doing what I could get away with that worked. I know it sounds disloyal, but… yeah, it’s disloyal. So what’s so all fired great about loyalty again?

The military is probably the single most hierarchical entity we have left in the West. Yet, even there… It’s amazing to observe just what goes on, and how things really, truly function.

The model is “I command; you obey; we get things done…”. The reality is that the leadership cadre often does rather less than we like to think.

Stationed in Germany during the height of the Cold War in the mid-1980s, I had this fact rubbed in my face rather effectively. The ideal was that we’d get the alert order down from higher headquarters, and then load up and be on our way out the gates to the local dispersal area within about an hour or two. This was not anything that was unachievable, but it also wasn’t as simple as it sounds, either. You had the factor of trying to get the senior leadership in from their off-post housing, and a host of minor complicating things that never seemed to go right. In the first several months I was in Germany at that unit, it went through various and sundry epic levels of f**k-uppedness. Best we ever managed was to be on our way out the gates in about three hours, from the time we started the clock running at the end of the notification phone call.

Then came the winter morning that we got the call from higher “calling the alert” at about three in the morning on a weekday. First attempt to notify the commander and the off-post phone chain produced the realization that the phone system was down, somewhere, and we could not make off-post phone calls. Staff duty officer sends his runner off to notify all the companies “by hand”, and he runs off-post to the nearest civilian phone booth to try to initiate the phone tree from there. No joy–Evidently, the German phone system is where the problem is, and all the public pay phones he can find are out, as well. Follow-on action on his part was evidence that he wasn’t as dumb as your average LT, and he immediately sent out the Staff Duty Driver with the maps to all the leadership’s quarters spread across the community. Driver got out the gate, down the street, turned onto the street for his first notification, and promptly got the jeep wiped out by a drunk driver who T-boned him.

Upshot? Zero “leadership” on the ground. Without them there to confuse things, we actually were lined up and ready to go out the gate to the local dispersal area when the first of the off-post cadre started filtering in to start the workday. Fastest alert response anyone ever recorded the entire time I was in that battalion, BTW… Only thing we didn’t have were the classified materials out of the S2 shop, because nobody above the grade of Private First Class from that section lived in the barracks. It was an interesting demonstration of how discipline and order actually don’t exist in the minds of the leadership, but really well up out of the ranks. If it doesn’t exist there, there’s literally nothing you can do to impose it from above.

That’s the point I’m trying to get at–The elites aren’t really the source of what makes civilization tick over neatly when the key is turned. That undefined “thing” exists only in the minds of the lower-level participants, and when they cease to believe in it… “Poof”, and away goes your civilization with it. Happened to the Soviets, happened to the Romans, and it will happen to the CCP and the Iranian regime.

The trick of it all is that we need to recognize this syndrome, and quit focusing on things like Harvard or the Young Pioneers. The critical thing to maintain is the feature out in the general public that gets them to awaken every morning with a feeling that they’re participating in something greater than themselves, and that those feelings motivate and inform their actions throughout the day. Lose that, turn it into “every man for himself, and devil take the hindmost…”, well… Yeah. That’s the end-times for whatever civilization there might have been.

In the final analysis, civilization does not reside in the institutions of the state, the edifices of religion, or the shrines of academia. It resides in the hearts of the individuals participating in such a thing, and when those hearts are empty, so too is civilization. You can drive men to civilization with enough coercion, but once you withdraw that coercion, the entire enterprise collapses. When it arises from within, it’s a far more durable thing, capable of surviving a lot more damage than the other sort of thing.

A republic is a form of oligarchy. The power is more spread out, and the perks follow the power. But there’s still a vast commoner class that’s out of the loop.

In a democratic republic, the commoners don’t know they’re out of the loop. Everyone gets his say, but no one gets listened to.

Thou shouldst pluck the beam from thine own eye.

Same thing is on view in China, today. The elite relies on the buy-in by the mid-level, and they’re really the ones that the “permanent floating parasite class” rely on to enforce everything and persuade the sheep into the loading chutes. It’s just like the real sheep herds of the world–The human shepherds would find it almost impossible to manage the huge flocks they do, if the dogs they use decided not to play along with it all.

My experience with mid level schnooks is they regard themselves as part of the elite. I think they’re right about that.

But if the elite of the elite bungle badly enough in the eyes of the schnooks, the schnooks can overthrow them. This is called a coup. The sheep are not involved in this process, and may not even be impacted by it.

Recently in the US a pack of schnooks intimidated a TV new personality into recanting a certain position. This shows you where the real power lies. The people we see telling us how to think and what to believe are mere figureheads. They could be replaced with computer simulations. Some day they will be.

A similar situation is being revealed to have existed for a very long time in the Executive Branch of the federal government. Pay no attention to the man in front of the curtain.

The schnooks are effective parasites, or else they wouldn’t be parasites at all for very long.

As to the “can’t run things without them” idea? Look around–What, precisely, do the “elites” actually run? If you were to remove them, and tell the people of Seattle or San Francisco to run their own neighborhoods, what do you suppose would happen? Do you think that people would be putting up with homeless vagrants crapping on their sidewalks, or littering the parks with needles and drug paraphenalia…?

The root problem is the elites, in all these cases. Were you to go look at the fall of either Rome, the problems were rarely rooted in the “little people” out in the countrysides of Gaul or Thrace; it was all with the idiots running things in Rome or Constantinople, who’d ceased believing in the entire enterprise. The “lower classes” were never the problem–It was the upper-class “elites” and the mid-level administrative staffs that internally self-corrupted first.

My point is that the elites and even a goodly chunk of the mid-level mob are both where things go wrong first, for a society or a civilization, and that learning to wean ourselves away from the need for these “thought leaders” is precisely what we will need to do, as a species, in order to grow up and become entirely self-actuated and agents in our own lives. The elites are necessarily corrupt after about the second or third generation, because that’s how it always goes–They set up gatekeepers, and become self-perpetuating. Look at the CCP–How many of its leaders are first-generation farmers or factory shop floor stewards? Any? No, they’re all children of the first generation of the Party, parasites all. You see the same thing, every time we set up something. Human nature, and a sign of essential immaturity as a species.

Two problems with the idea of just walking away from the elite:

1. They often have a monopoly on guns. If you walk away, they will quite literally shoot you in the back.

2. If you’ve been raised as sheep, you don’t have the skills to run your own society. This is why slave rebellions end badly even when the slaves win.

Bottom line: there’s nowhere to walk away to. The only option I see is a big, messy societal collapse and then a rebuilding by a new, emergent elite.

Care to imagine what the Soviet Union would have looked like, had all of the mid-level people just… Opted out? Forget what Solzhenitsyn said about burning in the camps, what the hell happens when the silent majority just quit playing? If you issue orders to your vast machinery of coercion, and it just goes “Meh. Not gonna do it–We tried that crap, and lookie here–Problems are still with us, food’s still not on the shelves, and you lot aren’t contributing sh*t to anything…”.

Which is about what actually eventuated inside the Soviet Union, per one of my friends who was there at the time. You can only pull off the Jedi mind-trick that is totalitarianism so long as the general public is credulous enough to buy into your police state BS. What do you do when they no longer kowtow in fear, but pat your secret police on the head, and say “That’s nice, Yevgeny… Now, run along and play apparatchik somewhere else, we grownups have crops to get in… You do want to eat, this winter, yes?”.

You can only overawe so long as you are actually something that induces awe. After you don’t, well… Yeah. That’s what happened to the aristocracy in France and Britain–The Brits managed to last long enough at the game for their headsmen to be employees of the Inland Revenue, while the less-competent French aristos wound up meeting with Dr. Guillotine’s invention.

The actual problem we’re looking at here is the underlying feature of our fascination with having someone tell us what to do–In days of yore, it was the hunter-gatherer band’s “Big Man”, then it was the priest-king, followed by the King-Emperor and his minions. In modern times, it was the state nomenklatura that overawed the little guys–For awhile. Eventually, they lost credibility as much as the former classes of “thought leaders” had, and here we are today, with our increasingly discredited mob of self-appointed idiots losing their primacy and credibility at an incredible rate. Soon, they’re going to get up on MSNBC and CBS to say that the sun will rise in the East, tomorrow; at which point, everyone will make a point of being up to actually verify said fact.

All of these groups have been “the anointed”, who’ve we’ve put our trust in to run things. Eventually, every single one of these groups has run out of impetus, turned corrupt and incompetent, followed by then getting overwhelmed by the reality of their involuntary succession. The root of the problem, however, isn’t in “them”, it’s in us: Why do the mass of human beings keep putting their faith in these petty little”gods that fail”?

At some point, we’re going to grow up, and stop doing that.

Domesticated sheep have a pleasant life, up until they get made into mutton. The business model of the shepherd depends a great deal on the sheep misconstruing their own interest. That’s how you get fleeced.

Small scale works well because it’s easier to get all the stakeholders in on the design and implementation, there being fewer stakeholders. A small mountain republic is an oligarchy minus the helots.

The shepherd business model scales better because sheep are plentiful. A hegemony with a republic at its head is the best we’ve yet come up with.