Plutocrats like Thiel are constantly thinking about the fact that ordinary people vastly outnumber them and can kill them at any time. They think about it way more often than ordinary people do. It’s a point that they are acutely aware of at all times. It consumes their attention. They are always working on manipulating public consciousness to ensure that we don’t think as much as they do about how many more of us there are of them, and how we don’t have to put up with their domination of our society if we don’t want to.
As Michael Parenti once put it:
“I tell students when they say, ‘Oh they don’t care what we think. They ignore us’, and all that, and I say, ‘Oh no, no. That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. The only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking. In the morning, they start, ‘What’s going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?’”
Manipulating public consciousness is of existential importance to the ruling class, because no matter how many billions of dollars you amass, at the end of the day you’re still a soft skin sack of blood and bones like anybody else, and you share a society with huge numbers of people who can very easily hurt you if they want to. That’s why our minds are constantly being hammered with propaganda into accepting the status quo politics upon which our rulers have built their kingdoms.
This is the real answer. The rich know it’s just like school shootings. One can trigger several in a short period and they’re terrified of that.
They’re not worried only about stochastic terrorism. They’re also worried that we’ll become an organized & militant labor movement and gain some political power. Or worse still, that we’ll seize the means of production and depose them.
I agree with you but I don’t think that last point is where this is going. There won’t be any seizing of the means of production. That just isn’t happening in America, and is arguable if it’s ever really happened ever, anywhere. Power has transferred, but never to the people. However, they are worried that people have had enough of their shit. It’s very difficult to start a revolution. It’s much easier (as evidenced) to kill one guy and make the rest live in fear.
That just isn’t happening in America
It’s almost definitely not going to happen while the US is still the global hegemon. I think the US empire will have to further unravel before this can become even a slim possibility.
and is arguable if it’s ever really happened ever, anywhere. Power has transferred, but never to the people.
From Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds:
But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.
The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.
It’s much easier (as evidenced) to kill one guy and make the rest live in fear.
Yes, it’s a helluva lot easier. But those people who live in fear also live in power. They have the state’s monopoly on violence at their disposal, and they’ve captured the regulatory bodies, they fund/bribe the politicians, they fund the NGOs, and they own the media.
