Selfishness, Business, and Fascism
Part of an ongoing discussion:
Our own Nate Winchester observes: ” I mean we’re in this whole ESG/DEI mess because businesses and investors decided they would be less selfish.”
My comment:
Perhaps. Or they decided to be more Gnostic, because they have not been Christian for two generations if ever, and a moral vacuum is hard to maintain, particularly when it is good for business to appear to be moral.
I suspect the business do not suffer from a deficit of prompt attention to their self-interest. The few businessmen I have known personally were attentive to their bottom line to the point of obsession: they worked from cockcrow to midnight, without vacation, a war with no armistice. They understood their self interest well enough.
What they wanted was good publicity. In days gone by, the tithes of the rich went to funding schools, hospitals, public libraries, museums and so on: the standard Christian works of corporal mercy. The number of libraries and such funded by Carnegie or Hershey is legendary.
How the foolish rich were led to thinking that good publicity consists of cultural Marxism directed to the destruction of the rich is fascinating to autopsy. The emergence of a new class of Plutocratic Socialist is one of the paradoxes of modern life.
The Marxists, studying the psychology and economic structure of the West with the patience of a scientist scrutinizing the microscopic life that swarms and multiplies in a drop of water, discovered one overwhelming weakness: a capitalist society with Christian values has an ambiguous stance toward money and money-making.
Investment banking was one weak spot in the economic model, and charitable giving was the weak spot in the psychological model.
A third weakness was that Protestant nations did not want the young to be educated by nuns, but instead by the state. A fourth was that a free press allows evildoers to advocate for censorship without fear of being censored. So the Left took over the press and the schools. It was their way of serving Utopia.
Businesses and Progressive politicians alike wanted women to be “liberated” from useful work as housewives, in order to be worker drones and wage-slaves, so as to expand the tax base and weaken the institution of marriage.
Step by step and year by year, cultural Marxists infiltrated the institutions of the West. This was all done very deliberately. The Black Hats do not hide their point, and they announce their plans, and they say what the mean, even when it is not in their best interest to do so.
After two or three generations of public schooling, the progressive daughter or niece who replaces a retired founder as CEO seeks favorable publicity, and she is foolish to the ways of the world, and schooling has frozen that foolishness into permanent shape in her soul as a hypnotic command, or demonic possession.
One paramount bit of foolishness is the same one that fooled Ayn Rand, and fools everyone lured into actually taking Socialism seriously: that goodness and kindness consist of seeking the Utopia that can arise only once the present social hierarchy is destroyed to the root. Goodness and kindness consist of eternal rebellion against laws and customs. Goodness and kindness consist of stirring up grievance and envy, provoking race hatred and class war, abolishing peace. Goodness and kindness consist of promoting evil and hatred.
Hence plutocrats donate heavily to Black Lives Matter and Antifas, and other allies who allegedly seek their overthrow. In reality, these agitation groups serve to decrease local police power in order to facilitate the growth of federal power, to introduce chaos into the social hierarchy so as to clear the way for a merger of corporate and state power, i.e. fascism.
The businessmen are not suffering from a lack of selfishness. They merely think that they will be in with the fascist party, as part of the rulership, the Morlock class running the world machinery, rather than being Eloi, their livestock.
That is a lack of prudence, and of humanity. It is not a lack of attention to self interest.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
