We often read about internal contradictions viz. those of Marxism, capitalism, polygamy (?) and so forth. What about oligarchy? Everywhere we look we see oligarchs and would-be oligarchs, and what do they do? They mine and exploit to a fare-thee-well and never live at peace, e.g. think think Southern plantation owners of the slavocracy or Putin’s buddies avoiding large way-high-up windows.
While most of us have some idea, even if it’s just from movies, of what oligarchs in present-day Russia go through, we know little of life in the slavocracy of the Old South. A little reading of scholars who have plumbed the depths of Southern angst will bring us to a grasp of living on the edge.
The horrific advances of monstrous social experiments like the New Deal and the Great Society could have been avoided, like the windows, by either staying away like by emigrating or sharing a little like your Kindergarten teacher taught you. This is where observations of society veers into the psychological, i.e. there is something in certain people, call it greed, hubris, thumos a la Fukuyama, or stupidity, that drives them inward. There, in their inner being, reflection goes to drown, conscience dies, sympathy withers.
Yet when we talk of the crippling effect of constantly looking over your shoulder at the humbled serf, the restless peasant, the sullen slave, the definat factory hand, we are talking psychology. We have to ask, how does that anxiety affect one’s thinking, even perception? Maybe those business leaders and political leaders, current and recently past, can look back on what they have done and reflect.