by John Young
It is well-known that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. This is why, in spite of his unattractive presentation and personality, prior to his recent marriage Anthony Weiner was presented to New Yorkers as a “most eligible bachelor.”
He had never accomplished anything of value in his life beyond the popularity contests known as elections. Never saved a life, never invented a solution to a problem, never knew the elation of personal achievement. He had never done anything of note in the private sector, so there is nothing to recommend him there.
Likewise a peek at his Twitter messages shows a less than winning personality. He’s no charmer, that’s for sure. If anything, he seems like a twelve year old smart-alec with a sex obsession — not exactly the average woman’s dream man.
About the only attractive attribute this man possessed to earn him a “most eligible bachelor” moniker was his position of power that resulted not from hard work and sacrifice, but from an election based upon promising to steal from the productive and give to the unproductive. In the rarefied atmosphere of the halls of power, a mindset dramatically different from that of the voters prevails.
Most people like to think that there is at least some connection between work and reward, effort and results, value and wealth, or cause and effect. In short, we like to believe that if we work hard, pay our bills, obey the laws and meet our responsibilities; our rewards will somehow be proportional to our efforts. In fact, the Republican apologists for Global Corporatism exploit this mindset by leading us to believe that we have common cause with billionaires because, after all, if we work hard, we might also become billionaires as well.
Even so, this is a mindset that we retain because it is part of who we are as a Folk. We have an almost innate sense of justice and fairness; believing that virtue and success are somehow linked or at least ought to be linked.
The problem for us is that this also works backwards. When we see that a person has power and wealth; we immediately assume that his (or her) power and wealth is proportional to virtues such as postponement of gratification, intelligence, diligence, and sound judgment.
In our hereditary environment, in fact, these sorts of virtues most certainly resulted in greater access to resources. When women found such a man attractive, the resources were really a proxy for the underlying genetic virtues that made it possible — it was the virtues themselves that were the real attractor.
But somewhere along the line, a certain percentage of people have become derailed from the natural order and have essentially fetishized the proxies rather than the underlying traits. Thus, we find certain men preferring women with augmented breasts and liposuctioned waists (the proxy) rather than the underlying desired trait — fertility. And likewise Anthony Weiner, in spite of his loathsome nature, attracted a great many attractive women by virtue of power — a proxy — rather than his actual possession of the underlying virtues of courage, intelligence and sound judgment that historically gave rise to power.
The problem is that in our system of governance, there is a profound disconnect between power and merit.
When the Constitution was first written, a single Congressional representative cast his vote for no more than 35,000 people. He was known in the community, a part of the people whose interests he represented, and he shared in the common weal or woe resulting from his votes. There was no way he could get away with much in the way of corruption as government powers were quite restricted to start with, and furthermore his neighbors would have noticed. In this sort of scenario, the voters knew the candidate directly. They had met him, had business dealings with him, spoken with him or even had their son date his daughter. His virtues were known, and figured prominently in his election; especially given that government at the time had not yet given itself the power to steal from some citizens in order to enrich others.
But now a single Congressional Representative represents around 700,000 people. He cannot possibly be known personally; and he is only known via a mediated reality through campaign ads put forth by paid professionals, public relations experts, propagandists and media pundits with a political ax to grind. There is no way to judge his virtues except by trying to read through a wall of illusion. Hence, there is no relationship whatsoever between his virtues and his election to power.
Furthermore, in order to reach so many people, tremendous quantities of cash are required for media and experts — quantities of cash that dwarf the salary of the job. Millions of dollars are expended to secure a job that pays only $150k. People will only invest money in something they deem to be in their best interests; so his campaign funding becomes dependent on people who believe they have something to gain. And heavily funded campaigns are, of course, more likely to win. Hence we are visited with the bizarre spectacle of the most easily bought among us being the most likely to assume power.
So here we have Anthony Weiner, a man who has walked the halls of power on the strength of little more than a popularity contest won through promises of theft. In that sort of atmosphere, where merit and power are disconnected and there is no longer a sense of shared fate with the constituency; it is easy for a man to see himself as somehow being greater and more meritorious than he really is.
Weiner is not stupid. He most surely knew that sending scantily-clad pictures of himself to female fans and engaging them in explicit sexual conversations on a public network was unwise. But he didn’t care. He didn’t care because of the arrogance of power. There is an assumption that when you are treated as a superman, you might really be above all of the same effects that pertain to others.
It never occurred to him that one of his female fans might rat him out because he believed he objectively merited their admiration and so they would protect him. But when push came to shove, because their admiration was based on a proxy — power — as opposed to the underlying virtues, their loyalty was thin as paper and when the excrement hit the ventilator, he found himself alone with his erstwhile lady admirers as accusers.
This is an important lesson for us at many levels.
Though it is certainly true that power is an aphrodisiac, it is also a proxy for other virtues; and those other virtues are a far more certain bet. One must develop one’s virtues to the best of his or her ability and let power flow from that; rather than extrapolating the existence of virtue from what is really an accident of fate.
Loyalties based solely on proxy traits such as power, wealth, or cosmetically enhanced beauty can shift on a dime. It is far better to count on loyalties based upon actual virtues.
Our representatives are disconnected from reality and hence vulnerable. Do we really believe Anthony Weiner is alone? Or Eliot Spitzer? Or John Edwards? The arrogance of undeserved power absolutely infects Washington, DC like a malignant cancer; and the only difference between one such case and the many of which we have not heard is that every once in a while someone gets caught.
Washington, DC has a huge Achilles heel in this respect. They are so out of touch with reality and think so little of their constituency that they never cease to be taken by surprise when they are immersed in a public outcry such as what affected Anthony Weiner and drove him from office. This means they can be taken by surprise so long as you don’t ostentatiously telegraph your punch.
But the biggest thing I learned is that people are stupid. This is no surprise, of course; as only sheer stupidity would have allowed European Americans to vote for Barack Obama once they learned about the virulent anti-white hatred preached in the church that he attended for twenty years. His personal minister and mentor, if you simply switched the terms “white” and “black” in his speeches, could have been mistaken for an Aryan Nations minister. Yet white people voted for that minister’s disciple.
Voters should have removed Anthony Weiner from office long ago for his treasonous, anti-Constitutional and hateful anti-American votes and advocacies. But they turned a blind eye.
Compared to the damage he has done America through his “service” in the legislature, his little Internet correspondences and inappropriate sexual pictures to women across the country are literally less than nothing.
Yet — THAT is what brought him down.
Think about this for a minute.
There is hardly an amendment of the Bill of Rights with which has has not wiped his back-quarters over the past decade; and nobody said a word. But when a few semi-naked pictures to a consenting adult woman came to light, all hell broke loose for him.
So … when we want to delegitimize the system, and we want people riled up against it … do we tell them about technical Constitutional violations? Or do we explain why the per-capita population of prostitutes is higher in Washington, DC than even in New York City?