"Who Should Rule?" Is Not The Correct Question

It is my conviction than by expressing the problem of politics in the form ‘Who should rule?’ or ‘Whose will should be supreme?’, etc., Plato created a lasting confusion in political philosophy…It is clear that once the question ‘Who should rule?’ is asked, it is hard to avoid some such reply as ‘the best’ or ‘the wisest’ or ‘the born ruler’ or ‘he who masters the art of ruling’ (or, perhaps, ‘The General Will’ or ‘The Master Race’ or ‘The Industrial Workers’ or ‘The People’). But such a reply, convincing as it may sound–for who would advocate the rule of ‘the worst’ or ‘the greatest fool’ or ‘the born slave’?–is, as I shall try to show, quite useless.

First of all, such a reply is liable to persuade us that some fundamental problem of political theory has been solved. But if we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any fundamental problems, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question ‘Who shall rule?’ is fundamental. For even those who share this assumption of Plato’s admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently ‘good’ or ‘wise’ (we need not worry about the precise meaning of these terms), and that it is not at all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: Who should rule? by the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?

Popper, Karl R. “Chapter 7: The Principle of Leadership.” The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971. 120-21.

The Cancer in Occupy

Photo: Anthony Upton, The Guardian

Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy.

Chris Hedges, "The Cancer in Occupy."  February 6, 2012.  Truthdig.

No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. We’ve followed our road too far.

Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, Prime Minister of Karhide

The Left Hand of Darkness. Ursula K. LeGuin

The Crisis of Democracy (1975)

Not My Will, But The Movement's, Be Done

By a campaign, I mean something finite, something that can be recognized to have succeeded or to have, so far, failed. Movements, by contrast, neither succeed nor fail. They are too big and too amorphous to do anything that simple. They share in what Kierkegaard called 'the passion of the infinite.' They are exemplified by Christianity, nihilism, and Marxism.

Membership in a movement requires the ability to see particular campaigns for particular goals as parts of something much bigger, and as having little significance in themselves. This bigger thing is the course of human events described as a process of maturation. By contrast, campaigns for such goals…can stand on their own feet. They can be conducted without much attention to literature, art, philosophy, or history. But movements must levy contributions from each of these areas of culture…

The epigraph of Howe's early book Politics and the Novel is taken from Max Scheler: "'True tragedy arises 'when the idea of "justice" appears to be leading to the destruction of higher values.'" Someone whose identity is found within a movement, either cultural or political, hopes to avoid that kind of tragedy by purifying his heart, by having only one yearning and only one fantasy. Such an aspirant will repeat over and over "Not my will, but the movement's, be done."

Rorty, Richard. "Campaigns and Movements." Editorial. Dissent Winter 1995.

Why I Miss Molly Ivins & Don't Like South Park

Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel — it's vulgar.

Molly Ivins, "The Mouth of Texas." People Weekly, Dec. 9, 1991.

Fear and Loathing

He never seemed to have much use for bimbos, or homos, like my songwriter friend, or even for casual romance. I did meet a porn star friend of Hunter’s one night at a dinner in Vail. Her name was Sharon Mitchell and she was a handsome and intelligent woman who now runs an AIDS clinic in Los Angeles. Hunter treated her with the kind of sullen disdain that was what you might expect from a boho snob with a hysterical loathing for working stiffs and service personnel. This remains inexplicable to me to this day. In Hunter’s Vegas book, the waiter at the Polo Lounge is a dwarf; the store clerk is a mongoloid; the room service waiter is a reptile; the lady at check-in is a gorgon, and I hate this. Savaging the weak is not funny, even if you’re purportedly “tripping.” Also, as a matter of journalistic practice, these working stiffs are invariably the sources from whom you get the story, because Lou Reed, for all his candor, is not going to share with a journalist his late night room service order for KY Jelly.

So, finally, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas feels feverish, squirmy, and genuinely afraid of itself. In this book, as elsewhere, one gets the sense that Hunter never really found his place, that he never really got over the La-Di-Da South, the Derby Cocktail Soiree, the Tea Dance and the strut of Southern Manhood. The manners were gone, of course, but the raw, hot, dirt plantation sense of empowerment remained.

— David Hickey on Hunter S. Thompson