Second Thoughts on James Burnham (1946)

Post by pessimizer » Tue, May 09, 2023, 5:37 PM UTC

spacebanana7 wrote: post #10

muxator wrote: post #2

> Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority.

This style of writing is highly misleading. With careful reading, one can see that author restricts the necessity of fraud to situations where the masses create value for a minority with no external benefit to themselves or anything else. However this isn’t at all clear at first glance. Read casually, the text appears to state that fraud is necessary for all exercise of power. The pivotal word of “simply” makes the t…

Because Burnham's neoconservatism is a sort of fusion of Marxist vanguardism and Walter Lippmann's panels of experts making decisions for the Phantom Public and selling them with lies. Burnham thought that the only possible way to maintain a civilization was through a small group of executive elites with access to the truth, but who kept the mass of the ignorant public docile through patriotic myths and slogans, and policing.

There's no possible stable order for Burnham within a society that is not run by a minority in its own interest.

Re: Second Thoughts on James Burnham (1946)

Re: Second Thoughts on James Burnham (1946)