The Power of Weakness
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Weakness is one of the greatest forms of power imaginable in the modern West. Weakness grants irresponsibility for personal actions and more importantly in a collectivist society, it provides freedom from the collective burdens of society and civilization.
The weak are not responsible for their actions. They
can rob, kill and rape, and still be excused for it
. They can blow up buildings, behead prisoners and
get sympathetic nods. Because they had no choice.
Weakness is helplessness, it implies irresponsibility because the weak are not capable of making their own choices. Their choices have been made for them by the "Man", the "Patriarchy", the "Privileged" and the "Military-Industrial Complex"-- all different names for the defined power structure and the people who are responsible for it.
Since the choices have been made for them, they have no choice but to lash out. When they kill, it is not an action, but a reaction.
To the people being raped or murdered by them, the ones jumping from buildings and coming to claim the pieces of their children at the morgue afterward, they do not appear to be helpless at all. But that is only because the people being raped and murdered, and waiting to identify a small can of their child's remains are privileged. So privileged that they don't know how responsible they are for the state of affairs which caused them to be raped or murdered. Which caused their children to end up in coffee cans.
Even when they are being raped or waiting to die, they are still the strong and the responsible, and their rapists and murderers are the downtrodden and dispossessed. The weak who are so helpless that they cannot help but seek their source of strength through violence against their oppressors. And if those oppressors happen to be women and children-- well then as the left has said from France to Russia to New York to Israel- "Power to the People". The "People" being the ones doing the killing. The oppressors being the ones doing the dying.
Weakness does not always translate into such extremity. What it translates into is irresponsibility for the collective burden of guilt that the left hangs around the head of every society. The responsibility for the poverty, the bigotry and all the inequities that are said to spring from it.
There are no more personal failures, whether economic or marital or ethical, only collective ones-- and the strong are responsible for their own failures and for everyone else's, while the weak are not even responsible for their own failures.
On the collective scale, choice is nearly irrelevant. Only people with power have choices. The idea that the man waiting in the alley with a knife has a choice is a heresy because he is not a man with a knife, he is a collection of social statistics which assign him an automatic level of responsibility based on his race, gender, socioeconomic status and all the other variables. Whether or not he stabs someone with a knife, is not up to him, it's up to how society treats him.
Similarly financial troubles are not personal, they are social. Whether you can pay your bills has nothing to do with you, but with your race and class. If you succeed when the statistics say that you should fail, then you are an outlier. A rogue exception that only goes to prove the rule. Likewise if you fail when the statistics say that you should succeed. Individual actions can never disprove the collective snapshot of how society is.
If every person is wired into society like a giant bank of servers, then every individual malfunction is actually a social malfunction. If a man kills, then it's because his connection with society was bad. To understand why it was bad, the left examines the nature of the connection. If it was a privileged connection, then he was warped by his excessive access to the innate racism, sexism, classism and all the other bad "isms" of the society. If it was an underprivileged connection, then he was warped by his lack of access to the benefits that society had to offer him and being marginalized, he went off the reservation.
Since all responsibility ultimately devolves to the
society, not to the individual, and since the degree
of individual responsibility depends on the degree
of his connection with the society-- the less the
connection, the less the responsibility. The man
driving to work from the suburbs is more responsible
for a murder in the ghetto than the actual murderer
because he has helped create the conditions that led
to the murder.
The "weak" murderer is better than the "strong" murder victim because being outside society, he is not truly responsible for anything. Not for his own actions or for the ozone layer, for toxic waste, illegal wars, unrealistic portrayals by the media and the rest of the litany of guilt that the left recites every day in its ceaseless prosecution of all of society and civilization.
In a society where people are expected to feel responsibility for planetary catastrophes and local inequities alike-- weakness is the greatest form of freedom.
Weakness is moral freedom because it liberates you from responsibility for your own actions and those of society. It is political freedom, because the weak can never say or believe anything that is inherently wrong, only "unhelpful". It is political privilege because politicians are expected to pay more attention to the downtrodden. It is economic privilege because companies are expected to redress social ills by advantaging the oppressed.
This dependent-independence from the system is a paradox as the weak derive maximum benefit from the system, while taking the least responsibility for it. It is the essence of the un-citizen of the nanny state who does not need to care how things are run, so long as they appear to be run for his benefit.
When social weakness is translated globally then it leads to global weakness. The globally weak, like the socially weak, are not responsible for their atrocities and genocides. It is the strong nations that are responsible to them and for them. Even when the weak are ridiculously wealthy and powerful, they are still weak. This is true socially and globally.
The weak can never become strong because they are a permanent constituency for change. To be week is to be in need of a protector, whether it's the nanny state or the united nations. Weakness justifies the illegal exercise of power on behalf of the weak. It justifies the disenfranchisement of citizens in a nation state, the destruction of nation states and the end of all individual rights if that is what it takes to create a just society. And that is what it always takes.
The left justifies its existence and its abuses by its self-depiction as a revolutionary force dedicated to remedying inequities in a permanent cycle of reforms that ends only when it enjoys total control and wields maximum power over every aspect of life under its dominion. Since equality cannot be created through the inequity of power, and since the left's mission is to create power inequities in order to remedy power inequities, its revolutions and reforms justify a permanent totalitarian state.
Social inequity is the permanent emergency that the left uses to justify its totalitarian state and the perpetuation of social inequity is the means which the left uses to maintain a state of permanent emergency. If one form of social inequity diminishes, the left finds another. And another. This endless search leads to a deconstruction of every aspect of society and the destruction of every human system. Human ways of living are replaced with grafted on artificial modes that fail and destroy their users. And the worse the society becomes, the more the state of permanent social emergency is justified.
The left consists of the strong who challenge the strong in the name of the weak, regardless of whether the weak want the challenge or not. By conceptually dividing the strong from the weak, the left disenfranchises the weak, and then disenfranchises the strong in the name of the weak. The end again is tyranny.
The left's remedy to inequity is to convince the majority and minority that they are incapable of exercising their power in a constructive fashion. The minority is told that they are incapable of it because the majority will not allow them the freedom to do it, but will thwart every effort they make at empowering themselves. The majority is told that any exercise of their power is a form of privilege which consciously or unconsciously disenfranchises the minority.
The minority are taught that they are weak. The majority are taught that they are abusive. The weak can escape into irresponsibility, while the strong escape into grandiosity. The weak refuse to take responsibility for anything until they become amoral monsters. The strong take responsibility for everything until they fancy themselves malicious gods who are destroying the earth.
By teaching some they are unnaturally weak and
others that they are unnaturally strong, both are
left unable to constructively exercise their power.
The weak are taught that they can't do anything and
therefore they can do everything without
consequences. The strong are taught that they are
doing everything and therefore should do as little
as possible. Both are taught to distrust their use
of power and to loathe their use of it.
The weak are taught to kill and still feel helpless. The strong are taught to feel that a single twitch of their finger is disturbing the earth. While the weak are robbed of conscious power, the strong are robbed of unconscious power. The weak treat their weakness as a strength and the strong treat their strength as a weakness. This leads naturally to the welfare state, to the elevation of the unqualified and the extinction of the competent.
Lost in all this is the individual as the pivot of life and the pillar of governments, whose rights justify the society and the state. By diminishing the individual to the level of a cog in a social machine, reducing his ambitions and dreams to irrelevancies amid the socioeconomic statistics that define his life, and eliminating his responsibility for his own actions, rather than those of others, the left destroys the base of every healthy society and the transformative energy that alters social orders.
In its pursuit of equality through tyranny, or tyranny through equality, it neuters the individual as the wielder of creative and economic forces that are actually capable of setting men free.
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Weakness is one of the greatest forms of power imaginable in the modern West. Weakness grants irresponsibility for personal actions and more importantly in a collectivist society, it provides freedom from the collective burdens of society and civilization.
Weakness is helplessness, it implies irresponsibility because the weak are not capable of making their own choices. Their choices have been made for them by the "Man", the "Patriarchy", the "Privileged" and the "Military-Industrial Complex"-- all different names for the defined power structure and the people who are responsible for it.
Since the choices have been made for them, they have no choice but to lash out. When they kill, it is not an action, but a reaction.
To the people being raped or murdered by them, the ones jumping from buildings and coming to claim the pieces of their children at the morgue afterward, they do not appear to be helpless at all. But that is only because the people being raped and murdered, and waiting to identify a small can of their child's remains are privileged. So privileged that they don't know how responsible they are for the state of affairs which caused them to be raped or murdered. Which caused their children to end up in coffee cans.
Even when they are being raped or waiting to die, they are still the strong and the responsible, and their rapists and murderers are the downtrodden and dispossessed. The weak who are so helpless that they cannot help but seek their source of strength through violence against their oppressors. And if those oppressors happen to be women and children-- well then as the left has said from France to Russia to New York to Israel- "Power to the People". The "People" being the ones doing the killing. The oppressors being the ones doing the dying.
Weakness does not always translate into such extremity. What it translates into is irresponsibility for the collective burden of guilt that the left hangs around the head of every society. The responsibility for the poverty, the bigotry and all the inequities that are said to spring from it.
There are no more personal failures, whether economic or marital or ethical, only collective ones-- and the strong are responsible for their own failures and for everyone else's, while the weak are not even responsible for their own failures.
On the collective scale, choice is nearly irrelevant. Only people with power have choices. The idea that the man waiting in the alley with a knife has a choice is a heresy because he is not a man with a knife, he is a collection of social statistics which assign him an automatic level of responsibility based on his race, gender, socioeconomic status and all the other variables. Whether or not he stabs someone with a knife, is not up to him, it's up to how society treats him.
Similarly financial troubles are not personal, they are social. Whether you can pay your bills has nothing to do with you, but with your race and class. If you succeed when the statistics say that you should fail, then you are an outlier. A rogue exception that only goes to prove the rule. Likewise if you fail when the statistics say that you should succeed. Individual actions can never disprove the collective snapshot of how society is.
If every person is wired into society like a giant bank of servers, then every individual malfunction is actually a social malfunction. If a man kills, then it's because his connection with society was bad. To understand why it was bad, the left examines the nature of the connection. If it was a privileged connection, then he was warped by his excessive access to the innate racism, sexism, classism and all the other bad "isms" of the society. If it was an underprivileged connection, then he was warped by his lack of access to the benefits that society had to offer him and being marginalized, he went off the reservation.
The "weak" murderer is better than the "strong" murder victim because being outside society, he is not truly responsible for anything. Not for his own actions or for the ozone layer, for toxic waste, illegal wars, unrealistic portrayals by the media and the rest of the litany of guilt that the left recites every day in its ceaseless prosecution of all of society and civilization.
In a society where people are expected to feel responsibility for planetary catastrophes and local inequities alike-- weakness is the greatest form of freedom.
Weakness is moral freedom because it liberates you from responsibility for your own actions and those of society. It is political freedom, because the weak can never say or believe anything that is inherently wrong, only "unhelpful". It is political privilege because politicians are expected to pay more attention to the downtrodden. It is economic privilege because companies are expected to redress social ills by advantaging the oppressed.
This dependent-independence from the system is a paradox as the weak derive maximum benefit from the system, while taking the least responsibility for it. It is the essence of the un-citizen of the nanny state who does not need to care how things are run, so long as they appear to be run for his benefit.
When social weakness is translated globally then it leads to global weakness. The globally weak, like the socially weak, are not responsible for their atrocities and genocides. It is the strong nations that are responsible to them and for them. Even when the weak are ridiculously wealthy and powerful, they are still weak. This is true socially and globally.
The weak can never become strong because they are a permanent constituency for change. To be week is to be in need of a protector, whether it's the nanny state or the united nations. Weakness justifies the illegal exercise of power on behalf of the weak. It justifies the disenfranchisement of citizens in a nation state, the destruction of nation states and the end of all individual rights if that is what it takes to create a just society. And that is what it always takes.
The left justifies its existence and its abuses by its self-depiction as a revolutionary force dedicated to remedying inequities in a permanent cycle of reforms that ends only when it enjoys total control and wields maximum power over every aspect of life under its dominion. Since equality cannot be created through the inequity of power, and since the left's mission is to create power inequities in order to remedy power inequities, its revolutions and reforms justify a permanent totalitarian state.
Social inequity is the permanent emergency that the left uses to justify its totalitarian state and the perpetuation of social inequity is the means which the left uses to maintain a state of permanent emergency. If one form of social inequity diminishes, the left finds another. And another. This endless search leads to a deconstruction of every aspect of society and the destruction of every human system. Human ways of living are replaced with grafted on artificial modes that fail and destroy their users. And the worse the society becomes, the more the state of permanent social emergency is justified.
The left consists of the strong who challenge the strong in the name of the weak, regardless of whether the weak want the challenge or not. By conceptually dividing the strong from the weak, the left disenfranchises the weak, and then disenfranchises the strong in the name of the weak. The end again is tyranny.
The left's remedy to inequity is to convince the majority and minority that they are incapable of exercising their power in a constructive fashion. The minority is told that they are incapable of it because the majority will not allow them the freedom to do it, but will thwart every effort they make at empowering themselves. The majority is told that any exercise of their power is a form of privilege which consciously or unconsciously disenfranchises the minority.
The minority are taught that they are weak. The majority are taught that they are abusive. The weak can escape into irresponsibility, while the strong escape into grandiosity. The weak refuse to take responsibility for anything until they become amoral monsters. The strong take responsibility for everything until they fancy themselves malicious gods who are destroying the earth.
The weak are taught to kill and still feel helpless. The strong are taught to feel that a single twitch of their finger is disturbing the earth. While the weak are robbed of conscious power, the strong are robbed of unconscious power. The weak treat their weakness as a strength and the strong treat their strength as a weakness. This leads naturally to the welfare state, to the elevation of the unqualified and the extinction of the competent.
Lost in all this is the individual as the pivot of life and the pillar of governments, whose rights justify the society and the state. By diminishing the individual to the level of a cog in a social machine, reducing his ambitions and dreams to irrelevancies amid the socioeconomic statistics that define his life, and eliminating his responsibility for his own actions, rather than those of others, the left destroys the base of every healthy society and the transformative energy that alters social orders.
In its pursuit of equality through tyranny, or tyranny through equality, it neuters the individual as the wielder of creative and economic forces that are actually capable of setting men free.