Man is by nature selfish and greedy. My father-in-law used to say this. He said it in relation to what he observed in the course of his life. It seems pretty poignant especially nowadays but it has probably always been poignant.
Selfishness and greed are only part of what has brought us to where we are. Another big part of it is the desire for power. It seems pretty clear that they all play in the sandbox together: selfishness and greed lead to acquiring wealth, and money is power. Sometimes power is power and that’s where politics seems to come in. Ask the Clintons about this one.
In our time, now, we have the advent of the political class in America, those lifetime politicians whose one and only goal seems to be securing reelection, hence Political Darwinism, survival of the fittest, the fittest being the most able to get reelection, most able to stay in power. Ask Andrew Cuomo about this one. Ask him about nepotism. Ask the Kennedys and the Bushs and Cheneys too. They are only some of the nepotism beneficiaries. Cuomo has it best, though, with his brother a shill for him on CNN.
And so it goes.
The truly powerful today are the very wealthy on the one hand and those in the leadership/law business on the other, the politicians, judges and even some lawyers, particularly the ones who become prosecutors, district attorneys and lawyers to the politicians. They are all people who have within their simple and sometimes singular discretion the ability to destroy many lives with a stroke of the pen and/or pass laws (or not pass them) which affect a multitude of people.
One spectacular image: John McCain’s thumbs down vote on repealing Obamacare.
Of course it’s all more complicated than any one way of looking at it, so surely there are others who could be put on the powerful list. But for here, now, the focus is Political Darwinism, the survival of the fittest politicians and political parties, or those who manage to keep power and wield it.
Political Darwinism.
For those of us who lived through it and/or those who studied it, we were forewarned about Soviet society in which only two classes existed, the rich leadership (the Politburo) and the poor people. You had to be born into that Politburo class. You couldn’t just work hard and get into it. We were taught that leadership class was inherently evil because it suppressed freedom and raped the very people it was supposed to protect of all their wealth.
So here we are some thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union. In our public schools and our colleges we are now taught that capitalism is evil, socialism is good. What’s more, beyond any sense of reason, we’ve allowed the American Politburo to rise to power.
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
Make no mistake about it! The only purpose of most, if not almost all of our politicians and of both the political parties in America today is to secure power and keep it.
The American Politburo is pure Darwinism at its worst, the survival of a class of people whose only value is to keep power at any cost, even if the cost is to disavow the very purpose for which it was created.
Divide and conquer. Keep them poor. Make laws for them from which we are exempt. These are their unwritten and unspoken mottoes.
In the old days, they used to say “keep them barefoot and pregnant,” which referred to women and meant keep them poor and tied down. This is the very same goal of the American Politburo today.
Political Darwinism!
