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writing for godot

How Did We Get Here Part III

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Written by Carl Peterson   
Wednesday, 28 June 2017 13:23

How Did We Get Here? Part III

 

First it is a question of providing for what is necessary, and then for what is superfluous; next come delicacies, and then immense wealth, and then subjects, and then slaves. He does not have a moment of respite. What is most singular about it is that the less natural and pressing the needs, the more the passions increase and, what is worse, the power to satisfy them. As a result, after a long period of prosperity, after having swallowed up a good many treasures and having ruined a good many men, my hero will end up by cutting every throat until he is sole master of the universe.  (Rousseau, from the Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,1754)

 

One fine morning in the early 2000s, Charles Koch woke from dreamless sleep, and although he did not understand it then, his inner life had at last manifested itself in his physical being. (Kafka, 1916) This manifestation was not what he would have wished for himself, and it took him quite by surprise.  For one thing, he had soiled his sheets thoroughly, and he lay in the thick, swampy, foul-smelling excretions, and stared at the ceiling for perhaps ten minutes, in disbelief, wracking his brain to understand how anyone could have got past security and snuck into his bedroom to commit this crime.

Charles Koch had not yet apprehended the radical change in his body.  But as he looked down to confirm again that his sheets were soaked and discolored to the horizon of the bed, Charles Koch noticed what appeared to be a three or four hundred pound creature's body where his own body should have been.  The shreds of what was left of what had been Charles Koch's vertically lavender-striped silk pajamas were held, transfixed, by spikey protuberances running the length of both sides of the creature's body.  What Charles Koch saw frightened and nauseated him.  Then he saw a mop pail's worth of fluid leap through the air and land beyond the foot of the bed, and he heard it splat on the polished French oak floor.  The fluid seemed to have come out of what was his own mouth and Charles Koch could taste the fluid's caustic residue and it took him a minute to work out how to get rid of it, and when he did it did not go far but landed on the creature's belly, and he knew instantly that the creature's body was his because he felt the fluid sear him.

His massive, gelatinous body trembling, Charles Koch closed his eyes, and cried silently.

Within a year, engineers hired by Charles Koch had produced a "shell" for him within which, and with the aid of certain surgeries he was able to go out in public without anyone suspecting that the former body of Charles Koch was no more.  Indeed, the only thing anyone really remarked on was that he seemed to be a bit handsomer than before, his teeth a bit whiter and closer together, his posture a bit straighter, his hair thicker and the gray silverier, his eyes glittering...well, his eyes glittered a bit strangely.  But that was it.  His wife, after 30 years with Charles, did not mind, it did not change their lives.  Charles was, despite the creature's body, still Charles, and, if anything, the shell made a better impression in public.

Indoctrinated in his youth with an ideology (Mayer, 2016) that chafed at any government activity that impinged upon his "liberty," Charles Koch, born into wealth, probably never had a prayer of establishing a connection to his fellow human beings, that is, other than the monetary connection.  Indoctrinated so young, and by his father Fred, a founding member of the John Birch society, (Mayer, 2016) Charles may be pitied for never having had the chance to know what it is to identify with the human race, to feel that he is really human, and that humanity is in himself, with all that that entails.  Because Charles never had that chance, we should bow our heads, and say a prayer for him, or if we are atheist or agnostic, or for some other reason prefer not to pray, we should at least share a moment of silence...

No.  Parents indoctrinate their children for a reason: to give them thoughts that will stay with them permanently, that will be resistant to any independent thinking that the child might attempt as an adult, that will stay with them long after the parent is gone, and that they in turn can inculcate in their own children so that the original indoctrinator can live on and on.  Indoctrination in youth does not always take!  Alas, it did with poor Charles.

The paternal indoctrination perhaps bonded with something in his nature and in his brother David's nature; their brother Freddie was able to break the fetters (Mayer, 2016) of the same species-alienating indoctrination, but poor Charles and David were not strong enough.  Born at such a disadvantage, such a burden to overcome!  They could have used some help for their condition, but there was none forthcoming, and anyway, since they were never aware that they had a condition, they would have been offended had any treatment been offered.  They thought and think that somehow their condition is a virtue!

But to think this, they have to keep so much hidden from themselves.  They have had to dress up what appears to be a compulsion for dominance in the faux old clothes of libertarianism, and other related ideologies that place humanity lower on the totem pole than let's say, for example, property rights.  It seems odd to most people (but not all people) when they first hear about it, that property is more important than human beings, since human beings historically preceded property, and property has no meaning without human beings, and property does not exist without human beings.  It seems odd that humans would create property, then sanctify it, then raise it in importance above all else, but once you have established that the most important right is the right to property, well then, you are on your way not only to making your own wealth inviolable, but to eliminating the significance of another person's claim to a right to healthcare, or another person's claim to a right to education, or another person's claim to a right to live in a healthy environment, or, in fact, any claim at all to anything that might conflict with the sanctity of another's property.

Charles had received the indoctrination from his father, but because he was trained as an engineer, and was not by talent or inclination a political thinker, Charles Koch as a young man in his 20s began to read books of political ideology and theory (Mayer, 2016), perhaps seeking instruction to acquire other people's ideas that would substantiate and justify what his father had previously indoctrinated him to believe.  It was as if young Charles were belatedly laying the foundation for the ideological house his father had given him.

Perhaps (because his father was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, and he himself was a member of the Society;) (Mayer, 2016),Charles out of fear never cracked a book written by Karl Marx.  If so, that is too bad, because there was a slender chance that reading a bit of the other side might have given young Charles the cause to pause, think and reflect about what his real motivations were.  It might have given him the opportunity to look at himself from a perspective different from any his father had ever offered, or that he had ever encountered while studying engineering at MIT, or that anyone he had ever met in his constrained range of human contact could have suggested to him.  No, given his youthful indoctrination and the times when he grew up and his unusually narrow exposure to the great spectrum of humanity, and his own confinement to the terms of the cash nexus, Charles probably would have been afraid of Karl Marx.  It is possible that his self-image as a strong person would have compelled young Charles to shut all the doors, pull all the shades, grit his teeth and make himself read some Marx to prove to himself how brave and tough he was.  But it is not possible that he ever could have allowed himself to read it in the open spirit of intellectual inquiry, and to understand it.  No, he could not do that, perhaps because his early indoctrination had made him too weak and dependent for that, and really, perhaps he was not intellectually curious enough.  The record of his life suggests that Charles was not looking for knowledge for its own sake, but that he was looking for substantiation of his beliefs, self-justification, and he perhaps coincidentally acquired justification for his later deep, extensive, yet for many years largely surreptitious involvement in American politics.  But it appears that Charles Koch never opened up for himself the opportunity to understand why his books of political ideology and theory were all pointing in the same direction, all supporting and back-filling the details of his already-acquired basic beliefs.  Probably during that period in his post-college days when Charles Koch's visitors allegedly noted that "almost every [flat, horizontal] surface" in his apartment was covered with "abstruse economic and political texts," (Mayer, 2016) Charles saw himself as a voracious intellectual, but if he had read Marx in addition to those other books he might have acquired the self-awareness to consider that he was just attempting to put heavy tarp after heavy tarp over the ideological veil that already naturally covered the truth about American (indeed global) economic realities.  But perhaps Charles placed these tarps not to hide these realities from others but to hide them first from himself so that he could continue in the life that he had been indoctrinated to live.

The books of serious political and economic thought that Charles did read, and that were congenial to him, he seems to have nevertheless digested in a peculiar way, excreting from his mind any aspect of them that was unfavorable to his inherited views and position in life.  Within his mind, perhaps Charles smoothed out the ideas in these books, refined them, purified them, so that although Charles found them even more congenial after he had altered them, what was left was so bereft of serious intellectual content, and so removed from a mature understanding of the realities of political power, that had he at that time written a book setting forth his own political thought, probably it would have to have been essentially a comic book adaptation of the "abstruse economic and political texts," that he is said to have devoured as a young man.

In 1980, Charles' younger brother David had run--under his older brother's persuasion--for vice-president of the United States of America on the Libertarian ticket.  In that election the Libertarian presidential ticket drew about 1% of the vote, which small favorable response was not surprising given the Libertarian party platform that year, which--like Charles' political thought--had unsound intellectual underpinnings, and did not contain a serious or realistic plan for governance in the American democracy.

The 1980 Libertarian platform said to the great mass of ordinary Americans, "We are going to take away nearly all of the things that you care about and that help to make you secure in your life, but in return we are going to give you this little card that says, 'I have my liberty.'  Do not lose this card and do not attempt to use it to get a free cup of coffee."

The Libertarian platform that year proposed to eliminate Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the US Postal Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the FBI, the CIA, minimum wage laws, child labor laws, public schools, compulsory education for children, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Office of Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), seat belt laws, all types of assistance for the poor, all income and corporate taxes, including capital gains taxes, all prosecution of tax evaders, all campaign finance laws, and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) (Mayer, 2016).

It was Charles Koch's opinion in 1980--as, apparently, now--that the state's only legitimate function was to protect individual and property rights (Mayer, 2016).  However, as we shall see, Charles Koch's definitions of "individual" rights, and "property" rights, as characterized by the evidence of Koch Industries' corporate behavior, appear to be highly idiosyncratic, and intellectually incoherent while his public statements, given in moments of opportunity to clarify and deepen his audience's understanding of his political ideology, have generally been given over to superficial advertisements of the Libertarian way.

After the Libertarian party's failure in the 1980 presidential election, Charles and David Koch probably realized that Libertarian elective politics was not a route to real power, and began for the time being to pay less attention to conventional politics (Mayer, 2016), and pursued a different strategy to affect political outcomes in the United States.  The Koch brothers decided that they needed to change the political ideas circulating in America.  By changing the ideas in the air, they would change the ideas in Americans' minds, and by changing the ideas in Americans' minds, they would change what Americans believed, and by changing what Americans believed they would change American perceptions of reality.  The Kochs began to concentrate their efforts toward funding, fostering, and thereby influencing if not controlling certain libertarian and conservative think tanks.  They would do much the same with certain amenable segments of American academia (Mayer, 2016).  You did not doubt, did you, that customized, politicized, intellectual products are available for purchase in America?

However, let it be said that although the cost of these purchases ran, over the decades, into the hundreds of millions of dollars, this did not necessarily mean that the quality of the merchandise was very high.  The ideas produced and promoted by the Koch-supported think tanks and Koch-sponsored portions of academia were and are generally of unserious quality, but it is not clear that these ideas have nevertheless not had some their intended effect of helping to create new views of political reality in the minds of many Americans.  Recall that shortly after the Libertarians won about 1% of the vote in the 1980 American presidential election, Ronald Reagan, the victor in that election, had induced millions of politically exhausted Americans to join him in his own pleasant vision of American political reality.  Perhaps there was something already in the air.  Perhaps Charles Koch was sufficiently conscious of it that he was able to process this shift in zeitgeist, and learn a lesson from it.  Ronald Reagan, the savant, had swiftly, simply, instinctively done what Charles Koch would laboriously, painstakingly, plot to achieve over the next several decades: Reagan painted a pleasant picture of an America that did not really exist, but that many Americans readily agreed to believe existed, and so in a sense actually made it exist.  Charles wanted to do something like that too, but his preferred reality wasn't the same as Reagan's.

Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

 

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