A Polemic: Never before have the plutocratic 1 percenters attained such power as now. They own and control much of the global economy and may soon fully control democratic governments as well. How will they maintain a fiction of democracy while actually ending it? the one thing plutocrats and new aristocrats hate is change, any change that nibbles away at their power. But the most salient feature of any democracy is openness to change. The old aristocracies had the advantage of resisting change by pretending to fuse their goal with widespread religious beliefs. Thus in Europe there was the notion of Divine Right to ensure aristocratic stability and that was reinforced by the notion of The Great Chain of Being which gave everything -- everything -- its proper, fixed place in the universe, analogous to chain links where each link serves a crucial and frozen function to hold the whole together. The underlying foundation of plutocratic rule -- the modern version of Divine Right aristocracy -- is absolute social immobility, the exact opposite of a democratic, mobile society.
So, again, how do the plutocrats establish their immobile society and retain the fiction of democracy? By convincing the democratic-minded people that it's in their own best interest to choose stability over mobility. Mobility, change, involves risk, and the social risk mainly falls on the 'haves' since the 'have-nots' have little to lose and usually much to gain through democratic or violent action. The best way to get people to choose social stability over risky social change is to make them afraid. Tell them they may lose their fragile economic security from the top or may face mob from the bottom: upheavals, war, and the like; find their 'freedom' restricted. They will be more than willing to give up the very freedoms they fear to lose. Invariably, a weak and cowed populace will choose a narrow, fixed roles so long as they are quite secure. They will demonstrate their democratic rights by choosing less and less democracy. That's what the plutocrats want them to do because it lessens the threats to their own ownership of the economy and governments. Outright repression, although effective in the short term usually fails in the longer term, usually violently, because no government ever survives without the tacit will of the people. That's why smart plutocrats try to convince people to stay as they are, to not seek change, to become a stable frozen link in the new Great Chain of Being. They like a three part society: Themselves as the permanently leisured rich and ruling class; the workers as the permanent yeomen middle class, and the vast permanent underclass of indentured laborers and slaves. Aesthetics, an invention of modernity, is the primary engine of social change. Aesthetics is the philosophical study of the beautiful. Beauty, never defined narrowly, is the catch-all word for the objectification of all human desire. All people want beauty and will conform their 'tastes' in every way in order to convince themselves that they can find or fashion something -- especially themselves -- to obtain it in some concrete way. Beauty thus involves constant change because it is driven by constant desires to be fulfilled, to be remade over and over. Every moment is a new opportunity to refashion our vague desires for beauty; it's the most fundamental drive to satiate our desires. (This is where Buddhism fails by preaching no desire and thus no change. It contradicts the most basic principle of life and is likely an invention of earlier plutocratic rulers). Because you seek beauty you seek the aesthetic and thus you seek change. In social terms moral and ethical change requires democracy because it acknowledges individual desires.Democracy embraces the aesthetic. Plutocrats and their ignorant dupes, paralyzed by fear, hate change and thus they despise aesthetics and therefore modernity and therefore democracy. They preach a stable anti-aesthetic, a redundant alternative that codes their own position. They look for 'universal aesthetic principles', as frozen as links in the Great Chain, that celebrate the rightness of their own status, fusing it to religious beliefs whenever and however they can. Show me a plutocrat and I'll show you an enemy of modernity, aesthetics, beauty, art, change, social mobility and ethical, moral democracy. The world has seen them before and they always bring disaster. darkness, ignorance, and impoverishment. Always. Today we have a class of billionaires who can't spend all of their money on yachts, estates, mountain tops, and fleets of hand-built autos, jet planes and new spouses. They can spend as wildly as they want and can't exhaust their funds, not in two or three generations as Tocqueville promised, not in a dozen generations...unless, maybe, they turn to equipping armies to protect themselves and destroy others (neo-Middle Ages). Most people don't realize that billions in personal wealth is not at all like enhanced millions in personal wealth (already comprehended). It is far beyond that. It is like a seashore of sand compared with a handful of sand. Do you think that those billionaires are going to be forever satisfied with new houses and cars, planes and spouses? No, they have desires too and they will seek to fulfill them in ways that enhance their notions of beauty, which for them is identical with power. They will have their armies and they will use them to ensure in any way they deem fit to keep the Great Chain intact, to suppress others for as long as possible. They can't do it forever but they can do it, and have, with lesser means, for centuries. wc
