(Niall Bradley) I was reading another devastating commentary by American author Chris Hedges on the overbearing tyranny of the State, and it got me to thinking about this popular notion of “rising up against” oppressors. Hedges’ analysis is on target, but I feel that his conclusion that we must “tear it down” in order to escape it is lacking something important.

To ‘rise up against our oppressors’, to ‘take back the country’, and to ‘overthrow the ruling class’ assumes that they are ‘up there’ to begin with. Yes, in many ways they are. Through their domination of industry, government, media, education and so on, they invariably influence – control even – just about everything material in our world; they possess most of the wealth, work in high-rise buildings, live in elevated suburbs and generally look down from their rarefied vantage point on the masses slumming it out below.

But when it comes to the important things – moral character, worldly experience, creative abilities, and basic intelligence – what do they really possess? Few, if any of these things. In fact, I think we can make the case that, psychologically-speaking, they are actually pretty far ‘down there’ on the scale of haves and have-nots.

Ok, so they certainly set no moral example to follow. Well, what then do we need the State for? Standard political theory teaches that the State is the final arbiter of contracts between people, without which there would be lawless chaos. Left unto themselves, claimed schizoids like Thomas Hobbes, life for humans would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” I’m not so sure. In fact, I’m beginning to think it’s the other way round: life is brutish for most because of the State.

Although based on research that is some 80 years old, Political Ponerology by Andrew Lobaczewski is the classic text for understanding how psychopaths and other assorted character-disturbed people infect society from the ‘top’ down, not least through their crazed theories that reveal a barely disguised contempt for human nature. Studies have found that the ‘intelligentsia’ are actually much less intelligent than the average citizen they ‘lead’.

One study, cited in Robert Kirkconnell’s excellent American Heart of Darkness, a revision of U.S. history through the lens of Ponerology, found that 58% of Americans are more intelligent than the average U.S. president. And in terms of moral character, most presidents were found to have next to none, relative to the national average. No doubt there are variations and exceptions to the rule through time and space, but I think this supports the contention that we don’t actually need the State, and certainly not in its Leviathan form, which begins with the assumption that man is inherently evil and so must rely on the State to bestow objective morality on him from the outside.

[By the way, you can listen to our recent interview with Kirkconnell on SOTT Talk Radio here.]

I acknowledge that sweeping generalizations are generally too simplistic; the world and human psychology is complex, and so ‘simple’, ‘final’ solutions have been instrumental in getting us into this mess. Of course some individual PhDs really are experts in their chosen field; some individual bureaucrats really are good administrators; some individual military men are natural warriors; heck, some individual bankers are excellent accountants.

All of these roles can and do have a productive place within society. But I suspect that, in general, the ruling classes’ importance to any given society – and I’m including roughly the ‘top’ 10-20% here, though the percentage undoubtedly varies from place to place, and their negative impact probably diminishes the further you move down the power/wealth scale – is grossly inflated, in much the same way the casino stock market doesn’t add anything productive to the real economy of labor and capital – it just distorts everything and interferes with efficient distribution.