As a rule — if you'll excuse the expression — I try to avoid the metaphors of City, County, Nation, Parish, Polis, and State in talking about communities of inquiry, much less in talking about mobs and populations and random samples therefrom that hardly deserve the name community at all.

But since our Jimmy-&-Larry-Come-Lately demi-urgents of encyclopedia writhing have themselves so manifesteringly invoked these illegitimate metaphors of legitimacy for their over-weaned and over-weening lexica — the latter come-lately and Arch Constabu-Larry with all the unmitigated Gaul that it takes to ask "Not yet a Citizen?", like some Committee Of Safety Hood at the gates of Paris — what choice do I have but respond to their constant challenges?

Jonny

Collateral Reading

• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Original edition, Harcourt, Orlando, FL, 1951. New Prefaces, 1967. New Introduction by Samantha Power, Schocken Books, New York, NY, 2004.
• Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness, Continuum, New York, NY, 1973. Original edition, Educacão como prática da Liberdade, Editoria Paz e Terra, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1969.

Jonny

Add Eric Fromm's Eschape from Freedom (1941) Isbn: 0805031499 for insight into the class and social determinates of leader worship and thuggery.

Yes, that's a good one.

I just started reading Origins of Totalitarianism — still trying to get my mind around the bizarre phenomena that we keep seeing in Wikipedia and now Citizendium. Hannah Arendt has always had the knack of getting right to the heart of the human condition — well, I guess she wrote the book on that — so I'm very hopeful that she will help me get a grip on what's going on here.

One of the things that has been tugging at my brain in our previous discussions of X-archies has been an almost ineluctable difference that exists between any one of these archaic systems and the varieties of totalitarianism that are becoming the sad legacy of modern times.

I think that the added element is something like this. In the various systems of feudalism, hierarchy, monarchy, oligarchy, plutarchy, and so on, at least, the sort that we see throughout history, the rulers are content to let a productive peasantry go on doing what it always knows best how to do, and they satisfy themselves with merely skimming the lamb's or the lion's share off the top of the common wealth.

But totalitarian rulers are not like that. Not at all. They insist on ruling the hands, hearts, and minds of the ruled, even past the point of destroying the people's very ability to produce the common wealth in the first place.

That is a very new wrinkle in the social fabric — one that is ultimately self-destructive to the holarchy, the totalizing system itself.

And that is the very sort of thing that we observe in Wikipedia — where self-elevated ward-heelers and their jackbooted boot-lictors, who care nothing and know less about any given subject area, insist on meddling in its daily business, even to the extent of razing whole fields of study when its peon tenders fail to hew the party line on every petty point of party doctrine.

Jonny

Copying a couple of posts from other threads where I accidentally wrote something fairly lucid on the subject of this one.


That phrase — Solidarity For Its Own Sake — captures the essence of fascism as I understand the word.

Many collective enterprises start out well enough, imbued with a spirit of solidarity toward a purpose.

As long as Wikipedians valued that solidarity as a means toward the end of collecting and disseminating the vaunted sum of human knowledge, then all was as well as it could be.

But that is no longer the case.

A regression of priorities has overtaken the tribe. They have turned away from the Sun of knowledge and retreated back to huddling in the Cave, fanatically fending off imaginary trolls and symbiotic vandals, trembling in fear at the very thing they pretend to value, knowledge.

Wikipedia has become a security blanket for their current state of ignorance.

Jonny

Extracting a generic theme from a previous remark ...


The well-known fact that one lie is never enough, that each lie demands another, until the web of deceit covers the whole field of intellect, gives us a clue to the dynamics of totalitarian thought.

The totalitarian disposition cannot rest with imposing its will on one subject area. It cannot bend the facts in one area of thought to its point of view without warping the norms that govern inquiry in every other area.

That is why totalitarian regimes so often end by Controlling Things To Death. Totalitarianism is a tendency of mind that would rather destroy every thing than lose control of any thing.

Jonny

Could some Mod please move this thread into the Meat-Meta-Discussion Forum?

Much Grass,

Jonny

Mod Note: Done! -The Joy

And don't forget Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. He wasn't a professionally trained guy, but he'd done a lot of, shall we say, fieldwork. This book reads like concentrated wisdom. I can only compare it to Francis Bacon as a source of one good aphorism after another.

Random Bump

Jon

Bill Moyers, “Welcome to the Plutocracy!”, Truthout, 03 Nov 2010

The Vile Plutocrat

(cheer up Jon, all is not lost......just 85% or so.)

This essay now has 24,000 shares on Facebook.

Jon