Another Rant About the Need for Mass Appeal

Frankly, people of average intelligence aren’t very smart. Humans are not as smart as we would like to believe. Sure, we have our Einsteins and people of genius, but there are thousands of Sean Hannitys for every Einstein. Your average human is not capable of much in the way of critical thinking, and he is easily manipulated. He is most comfortable intellectually “in the box” constructed for him by his masters.

The freedom movement appeals to folks with relatively high IQs in my experience. I have never met a retarded libertarian or anarchist, and the self- proclaimed libertarians of average or slightly above average intelligence whom I have known have all been fascists branding themselves as libertarians. The movement has got to figure out a way to get beyond the formation of an intelligentsia (it has this in spades) and to appeal to the masses of people with ordinary intelligence. It won’t do this with intellectual arguments. What we want are slogans and causes. We want a “class theory” that pits the ruled against the rulers and the common man against his would be controllers and that, when class consciousness is achieved, will make the masses believe that their own freedom and the freedom of their comrades are the highest goals. Presently, the common man is made to dread the freedom of his peers and to identify with his masters. The freedom movement has to assist the masses in freeing themselves from the delusions which render them so easily governable. They want our solicitude, not our contempt. I was once as deluded as the next man, and I am a pretty smart guy (although I have managed to conceal my giftedness from the world quite well).

I don’t propose to pander to the masses but to present them with constant challenges to their assumptions about the legitimacy of the state and the necessity to be controlled and surveilled and to pay for the cost of control and surveillance. Let no euphemism go unchallenged; let no invocation of conventional wisdom go uncontested; let every legitimizing abstraction be reduced to its concrete reality; let no reification of abstractions go unquestioned. Let us inundate the culture with revolutionary memes. Let’s make use of the dynamics of popular culture to undermine the dominant culture. Deep down in their guts, people want to be rebels and to stick it to the “Man”. Let’s show them what to rebel against. Let’s show them who the “Man” is. We want a little black book full of slogans and proverbs: “A truncheon is a tool with a worker on either end.”

One of the French deconstructionists wrote somewhere (I read it once but can never seem to find the quote) that many of the processes by which hegemony and systems of control are maintained depend for their efficacy on their being invisible. The act of exposing them renders them inefficacious. The freedom movement can do an immense service to mankind and the cause itself by making power relations transparent. If we “tell it like it is”, we will do much harm to the establishment and much good for the people.

We want to make class solidarity and loyalty virtues. Screw You Hyper-Individualistic Libertarians won’t be able to do this. Those guys will always undermine class-consciousness as just another form of “collectivism”, which is always a bad thing in their view. There are good collectives and bad collectives. Some collectives are phony, and others are genuine. The class represents a population with a significant commonality of interests to warrant solidarity as a stance consistent with rational self-interest. If the masses are going to identify with a collective, and they will, let it be the class.